Sixteen Days
by oflymonddreams
Summary: Set at the beginning of the Collarverse, sequel to "Seven Stages". Greg's first 16 days at PPTH as a slave. Begins where Seven Stages leaves off. Warnings for slavery, noncon, Horrible Things Happen To House, etc. Parallel story by Tailkinker.
1. Day 0

_This is the story of Greg House's first sixteen days at PPTH in the Collar Redux universe: the story starts where "Seven Stages" leaves off, and you probably need to read that first. This story is set in a universe where there are slaves, and Greg House is one of them. It's fairly dark, there is abuse, discipline, dubcon, noncon, etc, etc, etc. Don't like, don't read._

**Day Zero**

**_1. Overseer_**

The name on the purchase order for the new slave is Doctor Lisa Cuddy, the senior administrator who seems likely to become the Dean when Doctor Alexander retires.

Doris Foster had been slave overseer at PPTH for nearly fifteen years. She'd never seen a purchase order come through like this one, except when - occasionally - very senior staff had bought personal slaves via the hospital. Usually when a slave was sold or purchased, Doris was aware well before the slave was removed from or delivered to the hospital. She tried to call Doctor Cuddy but she was away from her desk.

There was a standard process for all new slaves to go through. Doris decided, looking at the huddled slave in the transport van, that she would simply follow it exactly. Whatever Doctor Cuddy's plans for this slave, there couldn't be an objection to that.

There was room for four cages in the van, each one big enough for an adult slave to sit upright in or curl up in, but the escorting guard left himself more room by only setting up the one cage. The slave was barefoot, wearing t-shirt and jeans, neither of them new or fitting him all that well. The clothes would be incinerated anyway as part of the standard routine.

"Get him out of the cage," Doris said. The door was open, but the slave wasn't moving: he was sitting in a shivering huddle. At least one reason for this was apparent as soon as the guard heaved him out and got him upright: the slave had wet his pants. "Didn't you think to give him a bathroom break?" Doris demanded, annoyed.

"What difference does it make, you're going to burn those clothes anyway," the guard said, defensively annoyed. "Anyway, he didn't ask for one."

"What's he called?" The purchase order didn't include any identification for the slave other than the ID code.

"George," the guard said. "Greg. Something like that."

The slave's head twitched up a bit when the guard said "Greg," so when Doris clipped the leash on to his collar she said "Come, Greg," and he followed briskly. He was extremely tall, which probably explained the ill-fitting clothes, but not the lack of shoes.

All the clothes a new slave arrived in are incinerated: slaves are shaved bald all over to get rid of any parasites and scrubbed with anti-bacterial soap: blood, urine, stool, and semen samples taken to check for any infections or parasites: fitted for new clothing: if they need any special items or clothing for work that should be confirmed with their supervisor and the acquisitions order made. Until the tests come back negative, a new slave will be housed in one of the quarantine cells, in a part of the hospital separate from slave quarters and wards. Doris Foster is proud of the fact that the slave dorms at PPTH have never been the source of an epidemic.

Doris took the new slave to the tiny room they used as admissions for slaves: it was a storeroom, but there was space to have an exam table set up and fixed, so that a slave could be manacled to it if unruly. Greg seemed docile.

"You can use that bathroom," Doris said. It was a cubicle without a lockable door. "I need a urine sample and a stool sample. Do you understand? Pee in one container, shit in the other?"

"Yes, ma'am," the slave said after a moment, in a small hoarse voice, and he seemed to; Doris handed him the two sample jars, one after the other, and he gave her them back with samples, sealed. Doris had called a nurse to get the blood sample, and he arrived in good time: John Collins, one of the nurses assigned in a regular rota to do slave admissions.

The slave stripped when she told him to, and put his clothes in a paper sack she handed him. Under his clothes, he was already as thoroughly shaved as she herself would have done him. He sat down on the exam table, put his arms out where they could be manacled, and held still for the blood draw.

"Semen sample," Doris said. The slave had been cooperative about the urine and stool samples. She handed him the container. He took it, and his other hand went to his penis. Doris was about to tell him to go into the shower cubicle, but he didn't touch himself: he sat there frozen, his mouth slightly open, his hands wavering.

Collins sighed with exasperation, and - he was still gloved up for the blood draw - took the container away from the slave and, manipulating his genitals one-handed, got the semen sample, neatly without spilling. "They get like this sometimes," he told Doris authoritatively. "When they've been taught not to touch themselves. Guess he's a personal slave? Who's he for?"

"Doctor Cuddy bought him," Doris said, shortly. She'd worked with slaves when this young man was in grade school, she found it exasperating to be lectured by him. "Now, boy, off the table, into the shower, clean yourself up."

The shower was another cubicle, clear-walled, next to the sanitation unit, supplied with hot water and anti-bacterial soap. When the slave was in the shower, Doris switched on the hot water and watched: he did a commendably thorough job of cleaning himself, some slaves needed to be caned for slackness. Collins packed up the samples and left to deliver them to the lab.

"Kneel down," Doris instructed him, after she'd switched the water off. "Hands on the floor."

He had so little hair left it was simple enough to get rid of it with an electric razor. He was shivering, though it wasn't chilly in the basement. She got him to wipe up the fallen hair and put it in the paper sack with the jeans and t-shirt, then spray down the surfaces of the shower, table, and toilet cubicle. He had stopped shivering by the time he had done these little jobs. "Good boy," she praised him, and clipped the leash to his collar. She had him stand on the foot measuring board, and put his back to the board that gave standard sizes of clothing, and took a note of his sizes, before leading him off to the cells.

There were three quarantine cells, which were just three tiled windowless cubes each about the size of a large closet - six feet by six feet by six feet, with a low toilet in the corner. They were near the furnaces - Doris had the slave drop the paper sack into the waste container for incineration as they passed - and isolated from every human part of the building. Doris unclipped the leash and ordered him into one. She would have to tell the labs to rush the tests, she thought, closing the door: at his height, he wouldn't be able to lie down in the quarantine cell, so it would be better not to have to keep him there overnight.

_*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*_

_**2. Supervisor**_

After three urgent meetings and a business lunch, Cuddy found time to listen to the message from Doris Foster on her answering machine. Greg was safely bought and delivered, she didn't really care what the overseer did with him so long she produced him safe and well for tomorrow.

But she did call Foster as soon as she had the time. Foster did all the purchasing for slaves, and Cuddy had a special set of requirements for Greg.

"He's in quarantine," Foster said briskly. "I asked the labs to expedite the tests - "

"Excellent," Cuddy agreed at once. "Give me the job number, I'll make sure they do." Medical tests for slaves tend to go to the back of any line, and it would be stupid to have Greg stuck in quarantine for this. "I want to see him in my office tomorrow morning at 10:30."

"Of course," Foster said. She sounded a little odd.

"I sent you a memo with a list of clothing requirements, can you confirm you'll be able to purchase them all for the department by next week?"

Greg will need two labcoats, enough rolltops that he can wear one daily, at least one good pair of shoes to wear in the free clinic.

"Yes, I got your memo," Foster said, very carefully. "I just want to be sure I'm not misunderstanding. If this new slave wears a rolltop, people won't be able to see his collar."

"He'll be working in the free clinic, and seeing and treating patients," Cuddy explained. "I've applied to have his medical license reactivated. It will be easier to hide his collar slightly from the people he treats than to explain to every one of them that he's a fully qualified doctor, owned by this hospital."

There was a small silence at the other end of the phone. Foster sounded as if she was on autopilot when she spoke next. "I can bring him up at half past ten," she said. "But he won't have clothes or shoes that fit properly till Monday at earliest."

"That's not important," Cuddy said. She wanted to reassure Foster, who had a good reputation for handling slaves. "He won't be able to start seeing patients till we get his medical licence re-activated, and that won't happen for ten working days." Counting from tomorrow - they'll get the application today. "But I want him working in the Diagnostics department right away."

"We don't have a diagnostics department," Foster said. She still sounded rather stunned.

"Well, we do now," Cuddy said. Actually, it wasn't quite as foregone a conclusion as that: she had got Board commitment to start a Diagnostics department, just as she had Board commitment for expanding the free clinic, but both were conditional on success, and she's tied them both pretty firmly to her belief that Greg House, even as a slave, had the capacity to be the best doctor who's ever worked at this hospital. If she's wrong - if Greg can't function as a doctor, if people refuse to be treated by a slave - then she may have to have him sold and hope to recoup what they paid for him.

"He's a doctor?" Foster repeated.

Cuddy suppressed an audible sigh and used the analogy she had used with the Board: "Think of him as medical equipment. He's a slave, but he has a medical degree. That gives him functionality that the hospital can employ when we get it reactivated, but he's still just a slave. We can work him how we like."

She put the phone down after a few more reassuring words. She hoped that Foster's reaction wasn't going to be typical. It was important for her future career, and for the future of PPTH, that her purchase of Greg proved a success.

_*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*_

_**3. Overseer**_

All the tests came back negative just before five, so the new slave could get out of quarantine. When she opened the door the slave was kneeling in the cell: he didn't look as if he'd moved since she left him there. Normally Doris Foster would say something reassuring, something positive about the slave's good health and how he should work hard and behave well, but she was still completely shaken up by his being a doctor. Could you have a doctor that's a slave? Would he be treating the hospital slaves?

In the hall outside, Doris handed him a pair of jeans, a bag of underwear and socks, a pair of flip-flop sandals from the hospital gift shop which were all that could be found in his size, and two t-shirts, and told him to get dressed.

He didn't seem to think of putting on underwear, so she she had to stop him and read him a little lecture on proper standards for slaves owned by PPTH: always clean and properly dressed at all times. He's to wash thoroughly and put on t-shirt, underwear, and socks, every day. There will be inspections, and if he's not clean and properly dressed, he will be punished. This was such a routine speech that it wasn't till she was done and he was dressing, that it occurred to her to think again: he's a _doctor?_

She walked him in silence to the dorm where there was a spare bunk, and told him to put the clothes he wasn't wearing in the locker by the bunk. She told one of the other slaves, Jon, who had the next bunk, to show the new slave where to collect a towel for his shower this evening, and to take him to the slave canteen for the evening meal in half an hour. Jon worked for Sanitation, and Doris decided there was no point in letting this slave sit around idly half the morning - she wouldn't let any other slave's time be wasted, she can't treat this one differently: she instructed Jon to take the new boy with him in the morning and tell Mr Smith to put him to work.

Doris planned to send Mike Smith a memo to explain she needed the new boy, clean and tidy, in her office by 10:15 to take him up to see Doctor Cuddy at 10:30 - there's no point giving slaves elaborate explanations to deliver. But she did a quick inspection of the lockers, based on a half-formed suspicion, and found half a chocolate bar hidden in Danny's. He used to be in personal service before he was bought by PPTH, and she'd caught him defying the rule about no food in the lockers before: he liked treats, and when someone gave him a treat, he saved it.

So Danny got bent over his bunk, his jeans and underwear pulled down, and Doris sent Jon for one of her light canes. She administered six strokes - she liked caning because the pain was precise and easy to control, you don't hurt the slave either more or less than intended. Tonight and for the next week, Danny will get only a standard ration bowl of pellets to eat at his meals. Danny cries easily, his last owner probably found it endearing. Doris did not. She prodded his shoulder with her cane.

"Pick that up," she pointed to the chocolate bar she'd dropped on the floor, "and go throw it out."

Danny stammered out an apology and thanks, of sorts, and stumbled off to obey. Doris gave a last glance at the new slave, lying flat on his bunk, hands by his sides, staring up at the ceiling. He really didn't look like a doctor, though she had no idea what a slave doctor would look like.

_*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*_

_**4. Jon**_

Every slave in the dorm, except maybe Danny, recognised the new guy as fresh out of processing and education. Jon was lying flat out on his bunk when Mrs Foster came in with the new guy. Mrs Foster's rule for the dorms was that a slave who was resting could stay at rest unless directly spoken to, so none of them got up: but all of them (except Danny, who glanced briefly at his locker, stupid kid) were keeping their eyes on her, and on the new slave next to her.

Jon slid off the bunk and on to his knees when Mrs Foster pointed the new slave to put his clothes in the empty locker next to the empty bunk, so he was ready when Mrs Foster looked at him.

Once the new slave had put his clothes away, he dropped to his knees beside the bunk, and folded his hands behind his back. He was waiting to be told what to do. But Mrs Foster had discovered Danny's hidden chocolate, and sent Jon for one of her canes: Jon ran.

Danny had been sold, so he said, when he was twelve. He'd been owned by a wealthy family, bought to be the plaything/companion of their only son. The age at which he'd been sold varied, and the reasons Danny gave why the family had sold him on to PPTH also varied, but he probably had been a rich boy's personal slave. Jon had never been anyone's personal slave, never even tagged, and he was pretty sure he didn't want to be.

Danny was positioned over the bunk, ass bared. Jon handed Mrs Foster her cane with a little bow and went back to his bunk. The new slave was still kneeling, quite still. Mrs Foster was concentrating on Danny. Jon touched his shoulder and pointed at his bunk: Mrs Foster would expect to see him lying down. She probably wouldn't do anything to him if he wasn't, she'd just tell him to lie down, but if he was where she expected him to be she probably wouldn't think about him at all. Jon lay down on his bunk.

The new slave had startled when Jon touched him. He didn't seem to have seen anything, he hadn't moved an inch. His eyes crept sideways, looking at Jon, looking at the other slaves on this side of the room also lying on their bunks. After a long moment - Mrs Foster had delivered one stroke of the cane, and Danny had already started to sob - the slave moved from kneeling by his bunk to lying on it, very quickly and gracefully and silently. Then he lay still, hands by his sides, and didn't move.

The signal for their dorm to go to the canteen drilled sharply through the silence - and Jon got up quickly and tapped the new slave on his leg. He twitched all over and didn't say anything - he was making Jon feel uncomfortable, bringing back stuff he hadn't ever wanted to think about again - but as the others were filing briskly out, he got up and fell into line with them.

It was another vegetable traybake evening, which was okay when the canteen put enough cheese on, and sometimes there was meat in each portion. There was rice too, and an apple each. Danny got weepy again about his bowlful of pellets. Jon picked up a spoon, saw the new slave hadn't, and picked up one for him too, putting it into his bowl. They were allowed to talk in the canteen - anything they didn't mind the canteen supervisor overhearing - but the first few minutes, when everyone was eating hot food, was always quiet. There was meat in the traybake - the scraps were a bit chewy and dry, but good. Jon glanced at the new slave's bowl - he was sitting with his hands down and eyes down, and the spoon was still wedged in the portion of traybake, where Jon had stuck it. Jon nudged him.

"Come on. Eat."

The slave's right hand sort of fumbled up to touch the bowl. It looked as if he was going to stick his fingers into it. Jon jerked the spoon he was eating with at the slave. "Eat with the spoon, boy."

Across the table Kev grinned. "Hand feed him, why don't you - boy?"

Someone else further down called "Boy, I'll eat it if he doesn't want it!"

"Hey Danny, give Jon's boy your food, he'll eat it!"

Jon shook his head. They had fifteen or twenty minutes left for the meal, and Jon was going to have to deal with this guy for as long as he was assigned to Sanitation: it was okay for the others to make stupid jokes, but someone had to make the new slave eat. They'd all been through it, aside from Danny, they all knew why he wasn't touching the food. "Come on, boy, eat it. We all are." He took a spoonful of rice and vegetable from his own bowl, put it into his mouth, chewed open-mouthed at the other guy, and swallowed. "It's good, eat it."

In a fumbling, awkward kind of way, the new guy ate his food with his spoon. He got the bowl clear. Jon picked up his own apple, picked up the one for the slave, and literally wrapped the new guy's hand round it before he lifted his own apple to his mouth and took a bite. After a moment, the new guy imitated him.

"What's your name?" Jon asked, when he'd got the apple eaten nearly to the core. The new guy was having trouble with his apple: he was making heavy work of biting and chewing.

He was startled to get back only a completely impassive, walled-off look: they'd just shared a meal, the new guy must know they were allowed to talk in here.

"I'm Jon. What's your name?"

The new guy took another struggling bite of his apple. They were almost at the end of meal time: any minute now the signal was going to ring and any unfinished food would have to be left. Jon took the remains of the apple away and bit into it himself: no sense letting it go to waste. "Hey, we're going to work together. What's your name?"

No answer. The new guy only stared at him. The signal went and they all got up, the new guy only a fraction behind. Jon had almost finished the second apple. They had ninety minutes now before they had to be in bed, and there was stuff Jon wanted to do, but he didn't want to do it with new guy in tow. He took the new guy back to the dorm and pointed out the showers on the way, and the laundry window where you got a towel. The dorm had its own toilet, and there was a tap with drinking water, and he pointed those out too, with the new guy staring at him with that cold impassive look and not saying anything.

Smith had a quick hand for any slave he thought he was being insolent: Jon figured the new guy would learn fast enough that playing dumb wasn't going to get him anywhere.

_tbc... tomorrow!_

_As with "Seven Stages", there's a parallel story told by **Tailkinker**: we'll be posting a chapter a day (each chapter covering a day). I'll go first, Tailkinker will follow. The story is finished, and between the two of us, it's over 140,000 words long!_


	2. Day 1

This is the story of Greg House's first sixteen days at PPTH in the Collar Redux universe: the story starts where "Seven Stages" leaves off, and you probably need to read that first. This story is set in a universe where there are slaves, and Greg House is one of them. It's fairly dark, there is abuse, discipline, dubcon, noncon, etc, etc, etc. Don't like, don't read. Parallel story told from Greg's POV over at Tailkinker's profile: we're posting alternate days. Thanks so much to Illumin, who tirelessly beta'd both stories.

**Day One (Friday)**

**_1. Overseer_**

Mike Smith checked his mail every morning between eight and nine when he drank his first cup of java and ate his first donut of the day. Two donuts, if the Krispy Kremes light was on when he passed it.

He had a new guy on his squad this morning, a big boy, but brand new - still bald as an egg from quarantine, and without proper work clothes. Smith hadn't expected to keep him - Mrs Foster quite often assigned the new boys to the Sanitation squad, just to give them work to do till their proper assignment was worked out.

The memo from Mrs Foster about the new guy said he was wanted, clean and face washed, in the Overseer's office at quarter past ten, for a meeting upstairs with senior management. Smith glanced at his watch. New boy should be doing the third floor bathrooms right now - it was ten of nine.

He finished his coffee and his second donut, and went upstairs to find them. The elevator was crowded with people starting their day's work. Every bathroom in the hospital had to be cleaned every hour, more often if there was a complaint, but the Sanitation slaves were expected to stay out of sight if they could. Third floor bathrooms were recently cleaned: they were on the fourth floor, and that meant using the stairs. Smith could remember (it didn't seem that long ago, either) when he could run up a flight of stairs like these without noticing them, but middle age and a paunch were creeping up on him.

There was a slave cleaning the nearest fourth floor bathroom - Jon - and he said new boy was down the hall cleaning the other men's bathroom. Smith glanced at his watch. Quarter past nine. "Okay, he's going to another assignment in about twenty minutes, boy, so don't waste time looking for him when you move up to the fifth floor, got it?"

"Yes sir," Jon said briskly, and went right back to work. Smith went down the hall and found new boy wiping down the urinals. He might have been doing a smart job or a lazy one, but when Smith walked in he went right to his knees, hands behind his back, head down.

"Nice," Smith said, unimpressed, and walked round behind him to give the back of his head a sharp slap. "Don't know what kind of manners your last owner had you on, but I want you working, boy, not wasting your time with this kind of crap. Finish up this bathroom."

He didn't stay to watch - any slave would work fast with an overseer standing over him - but he knew how long it should take one slave to clean up one bathroom, and when the slave came out, he nodded, mildly pleased: no slacking off. The new slave froze at the sight of him, clearly unsure whether he should go to his knees or go on to his next work assignment. Smith jerked his thumb at the stairs, and the slave followed him. "You're to take that cleaning kit back to where you got it. What dorm were you assigned to?"

The slave had a nervous stammer. "Sir ..." He got out the dorm number, and Smith nodded. "After you return your kit, get cleaned up, wash those damn flip-flops off, and get into a clean set of clothing. Fold those clothes and put 'em on the bunk, we're not made of money." The jeans were stained around the knees, the t-shirt was splashed and sweaty, but it'd do for anything but an upstairs meeting with senior staff: though in Smith's opinion the view Mrs Foster took, that a slave ought to be clean for those kind of meetings, was nothing but a waste of laundry: slaves worked, that was what they were there for, and a working slave was going to stink a bit. He realised that the slave hadn't moved, was still standing frozen clutching the mop and the bucket of cleaning kit, staring at him, and he snapped "Run, boy!"

The slave turned and ran, holding his kit so it didn't clatter going downstairs, and Smith nodded again, going wearily back to the elevator. He wanted another cup of java: the air conditioning didn't use to bother him, but now he kept getting thirsty, his mouth kept drying up. He stopped off in the canteen, now it was open: the coffee was better up here. The new slave should take twenty-five minutes, no more, to return his kit, get showered, dry off, get into a fresh set of clothes, and probably be kneeling by the foot of his bunk in perfect form. That was time for a cup of coffee.

_*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*_

_**2. Supervisor**_

Cuddy hardly recognised the tall slave - and when she did, she was furious. He'd been shaved bald. He was wearing ill-fitting clothes and flip-flop sandals, though Foster had said she was ordering clothes to fit him which should arrive Monday, but *bald*?

"He looks ridiculous!" Cuddy snapped. "I can't show him to the Board like this!"

"It's standard procedure," Foster said, very evenly. "If you'd made me aware that he was fresh from an administration center, of course I could have omitted the shave, but I wasn't made aware the hospital were taking delivery until the fax arrived."

"Greg could have told you," Cuddy said. She glared at the slave kneeling in the middle of the floor. "All you had to do was _say_ you were just out of the Center and you didn't need to be shaved again!"

Greg knelt still, his face frozen. He hardly twitched. He hadn't said a word.

Foster sighed impatiently. "Doctor Cuddy, if a slave had told me anything as impertinent as 'I don't need to be shaved', I'd have caned him. And I would have shaved him. It's hardly appropriate for a slave to talk back."

Cuddy looked at her. Doris Foster's tone had been perfectly polite, but that sigh had said a lot: this woman was the senior overseer of all the slaves PPTH owned, and her support would be invaluable. Would have been invaluable. It sounded like Cuddy had just lost it.

"I don't intend for this slave to be under your supervision," Cuddy said.

"Regardless of what work you have him doing," Foster said, "I am responsible for seeing that he's clean, clothed, fed, and exercised."

"Before he was enslaved for debt," Cuddy said, "Doctor Gregory House was a licensed physician, an MD with two board-certified specialities. He's our property now, but I expect he can still wash, dress, eat, and keep fit, without needing minute by minute supervision. He'll need access to the slave canteen for his meals and to the laundry for clean clothing. I don't want to see him showing up bald for work, and he can keep himself fit in the intervals of his real job." Greg House had been a fitness fanatic: Cuddy expected it wouldn't be difficult to have him take part in whatever exercise program the slaves used. She glanced at him: he was still kneeling there, absurdly bald, his face as impassive as if he couldn't hear them. "I would like your assistance in working out how we arrange this."

"What do you plan for his hours to be?"

"For the next two weeks, till we get his license reactivated, he'll be setting up the Diagnostics department. His hours can be whatever's convenient for you that match my own working hours - " Cuddy routinely got in at seven and didn't leave till after seven at night " - but he'll need to work out what journals we need to have ordered, what reference books we'll need for the department, and I will need to authorise each purchase. Also, I expect I'll need to have him go through at least a modified form of the induction new doctors get." He would need at least to know where all of the departments were, and the other department heads should recognize him on sight even if his collar wasn't visible. "Once his licence is reactivated he will be working at least four hours a day in the free clinic. So if we can work out now what his exercise and meal routine should be, it should be easier for him to stick to that once his clinic hours are added in."

"I assigned him to one of the dayshift dorms - 8pm to 4am."

"And that means what, exactly?" Cuddy opened up a notebook and wrote that down.

"It means that at eight in the evening, the guard does a headcount, the doors are locked and the lights go down," Foster said, sounding very patient. "It means that an alarm goes off, the light goes up, and the doors are unlocked, at four in the morning. That dorm gets fed at six in the morning and six in the evening. They do their exercise shift outdoors from three to four. If those hours don't work, there are other dayshift dorms with different feeding and exercise schedules and slightly different sleep schedules so the showers don't get overcrowded - I'll send you our full dorm timetable. There are also our two nightshift dorms, but those are locked for sleep between ten and six."

"The one you've put him sounds fine. I assume Greg can eat or exercise at different times if his work interferes. But if there's a medical emergency during the sleep schedule, how can I get Greg out of the dorm?" Cuddy asked.

"Exercising isn't a problem, within reason," Foster said. "But every slave has an assigned feeding schedule, and we do not permit slaves to eat outside the canteens or outside their scheduled feeding time. We simply can't have a slave who is free to eat at any hour. And we do not permit the dorms to be opened up at any hour while the slaves are sleeping unless one slave is disturbing the rest: eight hours sleep a night are essential to keep our slaves working hard."

Cuddy nodded. "I'm afraid you will have to make an exception for the feeding schedule," she said flatly, authoritatively. "I will work around the dorm issue."

"I'm afraid you don't understand how much discipline a slave's schedule requires," Foster said, just as flatly. "A slave needs regular hours, discipline, routine, set work."

Cuddy glanced away from Foster, briefly: Greg was still on his knees, his hands behind his back, his legs slightly spread, his face absolutely impassive. It was strange what a difference his hairlessness made to his general appearance: he looked almost inhuman, compared to the live wire she remembered. "Well, we'll see, won't we? For the time being, his meals and exercise schedule can be what you say." Setting up the Diagnostics department was mostly going to be a matter of Greg doing a lot of reading, and he could do that framed by the hours Foster had outlined.

"And I want to be clear that, whatever his duties while you are supervising him, just like any of the other slaves, he's under my authority when he's in the dorms, in the canteen, or on the exercise field."

Cuddy nodded. "But I don't want him shaved bald again."

"It's done for health reasons," Foster said. "Unless we have an outbreak in the slave dorms, and we never have yet, the groomer usually shaves faces and just trims head hair."

"Good," Cuddy said. She produced a pager, a standard model still in its box. She handed it to Foster. "Please take a note of the number. This is for Greg."

Foster looked at it with a frown of pure confusion. "I don't understand. You want me to page you on this if there's a problem with this slave?"

"No, I want you to page Greg on this." Cuddy waited.

Foster's expression was almost funny. "How will he know if I'm paging him...?" Her voice trailed off.

"Greg will know because he'll be carrying the pager," Cuddy said. "You'll need his pager number. I'd like your advice on what other non-medical staff might need to summon him."

"You're giving a slave a pager?"

"Yes. Will there be anywhere in his dorm he'll be able to charge the pager?"

Foster gave her a look. "No," she said crisply. The are-you-stupid expression was back again. Cuddy did not appreciate it.

"Then he'll have to charge it in the Diagnostics office. I'll take Greg down there now. Thank you very much for your time, Mrs Foster. Please page Greg when you want him for his exercise schedule."

Foster glanced at the pager. "I really don't see this is necessary," she said. "Greg, you're to be at the exercise field at three sharp, understood?"

Greg's head turned and he looked up at Foster. "Yes ma'am," he said. He swallowed, a big visible gulp of nervousness. "Ma'am, permission ... to ask..." His voice trailed off into a stammering silence.

"If you have to ask a question, ask," Foster said.

"Ma'am, I don't know where the exercise field is, ma'am."

"I'll send one of the slaves on the same exercise schedule to show you the route."

"Thank you ma'am," Greg said.

Foster shot Cuddy a look, and stood up, putting a leash down on the desk. "He seems perfectly docile," she added. "Do you want shackles?"

"I don't think that will be necessary."

Greg swallowed again and said in a smaller voice, "Ma'am, permission to ask..."

"Another question?" Foster smirked at Cuddy. "You should ask Doctor Cuddy, she's your supervisor."

"Doctor Cuddy, ma'am," Greg said. His voice was fractionally higher. "May I have a bathroom break, ma'am?"

"Good boy," Foster said, into Cuddy's embarrassed silence. She patted his head. "He wet his jeans yesterday in the transport van," she told Cuddy. "He didn't ask and the stupid guard didn't take him out. Doctor Cuddy, with your permission, I'll show him where he can take a bathroom break. On your feet, Greg."

"Of course," Cuddy said, gathering herself. "We'll go downstairs after that." The door closed behind Foster and the bald slave, and Cuddy closed her notebook and stared out of the window at the balcony outside her office. Her plans for Greg hadn't included a man who begged permission to speak, to go to the toilet: of course slaves were kept under rigid control, but then most slaves were losers, dependent personalities that needed external discipline to make sense of their lives. Greg House had been irresponsible financially, a complete mess in many ways - but he hadn't been a man who would wet his pants rather than tell a security guard he needed to use the bathroom.

Was this going to work? Was this even possible?

No other hospital she'd ever heard of used slave labor for the medical staff.

After Foster brought Greg back, he dropped to his knees again in front of her desk and she had to tell him to get up. "Follow me," she said. The office she'd planned for Greg to use for Diagnostics was a small room on the second floor, with space enough for two desks and a filing cabinet. One of the walls was shelved. There was an internal window into the hall, with a big external window nearby: it wasn't a popular office, so it had been easy enough to justify letting it be "Diagnostics".

In the elevator, as soon as the doors closed, Greg dropped to his knees at her side and knelt there with his hands behind his back. "Get up," Cuddy blurted out.

He seemed to flinch back and get to his feet again, both at the same time. But he was on his feet as when the door opened on the floor below to admit a patient in a wheelchair and a relative pushing the chair, and a nurse carrying a stack of folders. Cuddy stared straight ahead at the doors, trusting Greg would have the sense to follow her out when she left. Surely the command to "follow" once was all he needed? She should lay down some ground rules, that he didn't need to go to his knees all of the time - that he didn't need to ask permission to go to the bathroom, ever, because that was embarrassing.

The office door was only a short way from the elevators. They passed by a men's room door and Cuddy glanced around - no one in earshot. She stopped. Greg stopped too, and Cuddy said sharply "Don't kneel!" just in time to keep him on his feet. "Any time you need to go - " She pointed at the bathroom door, "You don't need to ask my permission, or anyone else's. Just go use the nearest men's room and then get back to work."

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said. After a moment, in the same small voice, he said "Thank you, ma'am."

Cuddy swung about and went on, feeling embarrassed down to her toes. She shouldn't have had to say that, it was difficult to believe she had to, if she thought of him as Greg House. The tall hairless slave in illfitting jeans and flipflop sandals wasn't much like House. She wondered how long it would take for the hair to start growing back - when she'd seen him in the sales unit he had hair on his head.

There was no furniture as yet in the office, just a couple of chairs that had been left there - probably by staff who used it as an illicit break room. Cuddy could smell a faint tinge of cigarette smoke and was annoyed. There were smoking areas outside the hospital.

"This will be the Diagnostics office." She sat down in one of the chairs and Greg dropped to his knees. This time Cuddy didn't stop him. She supposed it was what he was used to. "You'll be working in the free clinic during their busy hours, four hours a day. On Monday I'll take you to meet with the clinic nurse - " once Foster had got clothes that fit, and proper shoes, and she'd get a lab coat for him if she had to steal one " - and we'll discuss your schedule there. When you're not in the clinic, I want you here. There'll be office furniture next week. There's a small budget we can use for ordering journals and reference works, I'll show you the figures when we go back upstairs. But obviously the first order of business will be your proving that you are an asset to the hospital."

Cuddy paused. Greg House knelt there, hands behind his back, his face set in a kind of calm impassivity, hairless, collared. He hadn't said anything, nodded, smiled, grunted, any kind of reaction. When she stopped speaking, after a moment, he said "Yes, ma'am."

"Without a medical license, you can't practice, but you can offer advice. The Diagnostics department should assist any other department in this hospital if they have patients with something odd - some problem they can't figure out. We'll invite applications for a fellowship in Diagnostics. I'll want you to draft the fellowship description and basic requirements." The Diagnostics fellow would have a slave as a supervisor: she'd realized that initially this would be difficult, but she was beginning to think it wouldn't be possible at all.

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said.

"Next week I'll start taking you to meet each of the department heads. You'll have to impress them - some of them are Board members. There's a Board meeting scheduled for Friday after next, you'll need to be prepared to answer questions and show yourself to be an asset." Cuddy had planned this on the assumption that Greg House, even though he was now collared, would impress the other doctors as he always had: but the way he looked and acted now, he'd give quite a different impression. She might have to rethink.

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said, after a moment.

"And of course you'll keep to whatever schedule for food, sleep, and exercise that Mrs Foster requires of you," Cuddy said. She'd need to look into how slaves were managed day-to-day at the hospital, because the schedule Foster had described didn't sound like it would fit a working doctor's, especially the inaccessibility of the dorms after eight at night. But there had to be a way round that.

"Yes, ma'am."

She'd expected him to ask more questions. Any questions. "The reason I expect this to work," she said, "is that you always had a knack of seeing what was wrong with the patient. You were a fast diagnostician, you had impressive accuracy. The Diagnostics department will put that talent to work, and you need to be able to teach other doctors how you do it. You should also be able to deal with patients quickly in the free clinic, though bear in mind often they come in for reassurance as much as a diagnosis."

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said, after a pause.

Cuddy tried a few other gambits and then looked at her watch. She wasn't getting anything out of him and it was nearly time for lunch.

"I'll be back in an hour," she said. She had a notepad and pens in her briefcase, and handed him the pad and a pen. "I want you to outline the function of a Diagnostics department and its usefulness to the hospital. You can use the chairs. Don't leave the room, unless you have to of course."

Lunch was usually a sandwich at her desk, but Cuddy felt like she needed a break and it would certainly be interesting to see what Greg House would come up with. If he could come up with anything. He was so mannered and restricted in what he said that it was hard to believe he was still Greg House, but slave manners or not, surely he was still in there?

An hour and ten minutes later - she was held up by an encounter with the head of Physiotherapy, who wanted to talk about a Board decision Cuddy hadn't been responsible for - she got back to the second floor office. Greg was kneeling in a corner: the notepad was on the floor and he was still writing in it. He stopped when she came in, looked up at her, and looked in some inexpressible way _relieved_. He offered her the notepad.

"Okay, let's go up to my office," Cuddy said. It occurred to her that he hadn't, if Foster's outline of his day was correct, had anything to eat or drink since six in the morning. Foster seemed to think he shouldn't be given anything to eat outside meal times, but that surely couldn't apply to a cup of coffee. Or at least a drink of water.

She went into the oncology lounge and poured two cups of coffee and told Greg to carry them. Back in her office she settled down comfortably at her desk, took one cup of coffee from Greg, and opened up the notepad.

The first two or three pages were sensible enough: then there were two pages of jagged, crooked, almost unreadable handwriting: then a few more pages in more sensible handwriting, ending in a broken sentence - presumably when Cuddy had come in.

"What happened here?" Cuddy said. She looked up. Greg hadn't touched his coffee. He was still holding the cup, slightly out from his body. "If you don't want the coffee, just put it down," she said, a bit annoyed. "What happened here?" She showed him the two messy pages. "The rest is fine," she added. It was a good, clear outline that demonstrated Greg had been paying attention to her and thinking about it.

"Some people came in to have lunch, ma'am," Greg said after a moment. "They wanted to know what I was doing there." He wasn't quite stammering, but his voice was shaking.

"What did you tell them?" Cuddy was annoyed.

The slave was silent. No doubt he'd told them everything he knew, and a garbled version would be spreading through the hospital. Cuddy shook her head. She probably shouldn't have just left him on his own. "You shouldn't have let them distract you. You were working on something for me." She had some work to do on the report she would send to the Board next week. She would have to make clear to staff that when the Diagnostics slave was in the Diagnostics office, he wasn't to be disturbed or distracted.

Cuddy got him to recopy his notes more clearly, amended with figures from the budget she'd been allotted for the first six months of the Diagnostics department. His price was on the budget, she realized when he handed her his notes back to look at, and there was some kind of convention that you never let a slave know how much they'd cost, but Greg must be aware he'd been quite an expensive slave. She sent him down the hall to give his notes and her report to the secretary to type up. When he came back, she let him study the budget and timetable for the free clinic and work out a timetable for when he thought his four hours would be most useful. At the moment, it was staffed by volunteers - doctors on fellowships and interns and junior nurses, mostly - putting in two hours a week apiece, and there was one full-time nurse, Brenda Previn.

He drank the coffee. An hour later, when she was busy on a schedule for the Physio department, she was aware of his getting up and leaving the room, and his return five minutes later. Cuddy didn't say anything - that would have defeated the point - but she was pleased. A slave came in at three and wanted to take Greg away for exercise, but he was working hard and Foster had said the exercise schedule was flexible between nine and five, so Cuddy sent the slave away again: she was happy, on the whole, with how the day had gone.

_*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*_

**_3. Danny_**

There had been a time, nearly a year ago, when Danny had still believed with all his heart that when Paul found out that his parents had sold his best friend (Paul had told Danny again and again, that they were best friends) that he would come find him. Would buy him back.

That hope had nearly faded. Danny remembered it still when something happened - when Mrs Foster caned him for breaking a rule that Paul would just have laughed about, when he opened up his mouth or his ass to someone who wasn't Paul. But every time he felt for the hope that Paul would find him, it was more tenuous: worn away not by the canings or the strange dicks inside him, but by the daily things that Paul would never have made him do: eat bowlfuls of slave chow instead of proper food, exercise naked even when it was cold and rainy, work all the time without stopping - Other slaves goofed off, but somehow they didn't get caught like Danny always seemed to. It wasn't fair.

Mrs Foster had told him about noon that at two-thirty he should quit early, go find the new slave, Greg, and show him the way to the exercise field. She'd told him where to look, but there were two possible places, one on the fourth floor and one on the second floor, and of course he was on the fourth floor. It was one of the administrative offices: the name on the door was Doctor Cuddy.

Danny put on his nicest face, knocked on the door, and knelt gracefully as soon as he was inside. "Doctor Cuddy," he murmured, bowing his head.

"What is it?" Cuddy asked briskly. The new slave was kneeling close by her desk: a notebook on the floor in front of him, and an empty coffee cup. He was writing. It looked like the new slave was getting treats and doing light work for it. He actually picked up a piece of paper and looked at it and then copied something from it into his notebook. It didn't look like hard work. Danny was envious.

"Doctor Cuddy, ma'am, I'm supposed to take Greg to the exercise field."

"Come back later," Cuddy said. "I have a meeting at four, you can get him then. Run along."

Surprised and a bit scared, Danny got to his feet and backed quickly out of the room. Doctor Cuddy didn't even seem to have noticed him. If Danny didn't run, he was going to be late, and he'd assumed that he would have "finding the new slave" as an excuse for being late.

He was late, and Mr Johnson caned him twice and put him to running over hurdles, which he hated. And then Mrs Foster came by the exercise field and asked where the new slave was, and when Danny told her Doctor Cuddy had told him to "come back later", she looked so angry that he thought he was sure to get caned again.

_**4. Overseer**_

At quarter of four, Doris Foster knocked at the door of Doctor Cuddy's office. Greg was kneeling by her desk: she was showing him something on hospital stationery.

"Greg should have gone for his exercise session three quarters of an hour ago, Doctor Cuddy," she said.

"I have a meeting at four," Cuddy said. She glanced at her watch. "You can have him now. I thought you said his exercise session was flexible?"

Doris picked up the leash from where she had left it this morning, clipped it on to Greg's collar, and nodded to Cuddy. "Excuse me a moment." She led Greg outside and tethered him to one of the wall brackets.

Doctor Cuddy was putting papers into her briefcase when Doris came back in. "I really have to leave now," she said dismissively.

"The reason I am responsible for making sure that the slaves are kept clean, fed, exercised, and clothed," Doris said, very crisply and clearly, "is that we don't expect slaves to be able to take any responsibility for that themselves. Most of our slaves work indoors all day. It's a legal requirement for their health and wellbeing for them to spend an hour outdoors in daylight. You cannot simply decide that you will cancel his exercise session, any more than you can simply decide you'll interrupt his sleep or cancel his meals. The exercise supervisor works seven to five and prefers to have the exercise sessions completed by four to allow time for administration and clear-up."

"I'll bear that in mind," Cuddy said. "I appreciate your concern for his wellbeing." She smiled at Doris, nicely, and brushed past her on the way out of the door.

The exercise field was just a stretch of walled off muddy grass. Slaves stripped in the hall just inside and put their clothes on the benches: on very muddy days they were hosed down before they came in, and there was a big communal shower to clean them off. Matt Johnson, who supervised, wasn't pleased to have a new slave added at five past four, but he told Greg to run round the ground until Matt blew the whistle, and the new slave set off at an enthusiastic pace.

"Well, he's not lazy," Matt told Doris, looking after him. "I had to cane that little piece of crap Danny again, he was five minutes late. Blubbered non stop. You should sell him."

"That's not my call," Doris said, sighing. She'd love to see the back of Danny, he was the worst nuisance. "Greg can help you do clear-up. Send him back to his dorm when you're done with him, he's finished work now till tomorrow."

"Is he now?" Matt glanced at Greg again, and Doris caught an appreciative gleam in his eye. He glanced back at her and grinned, mischievously. "Come on, no harm no foul."

Doris chuckled despite herself. "Well, don't feed him treats and spoil his feeding schedule."

"Cross my heart and hope to die," Matt said, still grinning like an amused boy. "What's his food schedule?"

Doris tut-tutted. "Six. Remember my rules - if he gets upset, you're to stop. And he's to be in bed by eight."

Doctor Cuddy sometimes worked Saturdays, but not always. Doris thought she would just put Greg back on the Sanitation squad for the next two days - regular work and exercise would be the best thing for him. Doctor Cuddy really couldn't be allowed to mess around a good, hardworking, docile slave - who_ couldn't_ be a doctor. How could any slave make medical decisions?

_tbc - Tailkinker will post Day 1 of Greg's story tomorrow, and I'll post Day 2 the next day. We decided to it that way after Day Zero because some of the days Greg has at PPTH are very long indeed..._

_Hope you enjoy - R&R!_


	3. Day 2

_This is the story of Greg House's first sixteen days at PPTH in the Collar Redux universe: the story starts where "Seven Stages" leaves off, and you probably need to read that first. This story is set in a universe where there are slaves, and Greg House is one of them. It's fairly dark, there is abuse, discipline, dubcon, noncon, etc, etc, etc. Don't like, don't read. (Do like, do leave reviews... cause RAL!) Parallel story told from Greg's POV over at Tailkinker's profile: we're posting alternate days._

**Day Two (Saturday)**

**_Supervisor_**

Cuddy checked: Doris Foster worked Mondays to Fridays, and was on call at weekends. She had a staff of four overseers, and they rotated weekends on duty. So unless there was an emergency of some kind, Foster wouldn't be around at the weekend.

At half of nine, when she called down to the slave overseer's office, she found that Greg was at work cleaning bathrooms. "Did you want to interview him, Doctor Cuddy?"

"Yes, send him up to my office," Cuddy said.

"How long did you want him for?"

"Till five," Cuddy said. "I'm aware of his exercise schedule, I'll take him out for an hour during the day."

"Till _five?_" The voice at the other end of the phone sounded really skeptical. "Mrs Foster has Greg listed as doing Sanitation work today and tomorrow, Doctor Cuddy. Do you really need to interview him all day today?"

"He wasn't purchased to do janitorial work," Cuddy said, through gritted teeth. "I'm his supervisor, not Mrs Foster. Send him up to my office, right now: I'll supervise his work and exercise till five."

Greg arrived about five minutes later: he was wearing stained jeans and t-shirt. He smelled of the strong disinfectant soap the hospital bought in industrial quantities, and both fresh and stale sweat. Cuddy stared at him in disbelief. After a moment, Greg dropped to his knees, put his hands behind his back, and bowed his head. Cuddy stood up. "This is unacceptable," she said. She noticed, separately from the mess Greg was in, that his scalp didn't look bald any more: he was regrowing his head hair. She walked round the desk to have a closer look, suddenly interested. Of course Greg shouldn't be this dirty, but that was fixable, like making sure he had clothes and shoes that fitted: but the bald head had made him look just impossible. Perhaps by next Friday he would have a generally better appearance, and she could fix his manners: he had to be ready to help interview candidates for the Diagnostics fellowship, so he had to look and act more like a doctor and less like one of the mindless workers who kept the hospital clean. Surely there were slaves who did skilled work: Cuddy had never yet owned a slave, but she had seen collared workers doing all sorts of tasks.

Greg was trembling, she saw with surprise: as if he were literally shaking with cold. "Get up," Cuddy told him. "You shouldn't be going to your knees all the time."

Greg stood, easily and with a sudden physical grace that was almost shocking. His head was still bowed, his hands were still behind his back. "Sorry, ma'am," he said.

"Really - this is unacceptable. You weren't bought to do this kind of work. You shouldn't be turning up in my office dressed like this or smelling like this."

"Sorry, ma'am," Greg said again.

"Do you have _anything_ clean to wear?"

"The clothes I wore yesterday, ma'am," Greg said after a moment.

How much could it cost, really, to buy Greg a clean outfit to wear? Granted he was tall, but he was no freak. Jeans, a t-shirt, a button-down shirt, socks, shoes, underwear - it would make a clear statement that _this_ slave was not simply to be assigned to any work crew.

"Hurry back down to your dorm, get cleaned up and change into your other clothes," Cuddy told him. "If anyone tries to stop you or tells you to do anything else, tell them to call my office. Then come right back up here."

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said, and ran. He seemed to have taken literally her instruction to hurry: she hoped he would take as literally her instruction to get anyone who tried to stop him to call her.

Someone did call her - one of the security staff - but it was a brief check-in call. she'd been surprised to see a slave going into his dorm at this time of day, and merely wanted to be sure Doctor Cuddy really had authorized his doing so.

When Greg came back, he looked and smelled cleaner, practically respectable. Cuddy had taken the time to check up on the regulations, as well as the location of the nearest store that sold cheap men's clothing, and had discovered it was quite within the rules for a slave's supervisor to take him off hospital grounds so long as reasonable precautions were taken to ensure the slave did not attempt escape: a leash, cuffs, or shackles were recommended.

Cuddy considered this, looking at Greg. He could certainly outrun her. He appeared to be completely docile, but she wouldn't care to tell the Board her expensive slave had run away and she'd failed to take precautions because he _appeared_ docile. Doris Foster had left shackles and a leash, but no cuffs: Cuddy was not anxious to draw any attention to her planned excursion by asking for a loan of any equipment.

"We're going outside, Greg," she told him. "Hospital regulations say I have to have you shackled and on a leash. Don't give me any trouble, and in future, we may be able to dispense with the shackles."

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said after a moment. He was staring at her wide-eyed.

In the underground carpark, Cuddy got Greg to sit in the back of the car. He held out his feet quite obediently for her to shackle his legs together: the shackles were designed to allow someone to take small steps. She had called ahead to the store to let them know she would be arriving with a "chattel employee" she wanted to have outfitted: to her relief, the sales assistant was matter-of-fact, treating her outline of what she wanted as a commonplace. She tethered Greg by his leash to a fastening on the wall, and the sales assistant unshackled him and measured him. He handled Greg quite intimately: Cuddy glanced away, briefly embarrassed, though Greg himself appeared quite unmoved by being touched like this. When Cuddy looked back, the sales assistant was checking his t-shirt size, and Greg was still standing impassively, quite still, hands by his sides unmoving.

She realized when the sales assistant began to offer her a more expensive set of clothing that this store took for granted Greg was her personal possession, that she'd be buying several outfits for him, not just the one. Cuddy was amused: she would be able to afford her own personal slave pretty soon, someone to do her housework and general upkeep, providing she went for a fairly cheap item, but she would never buy any slave like Greg to work for her personally.

"I'll just take these," Cuddy said, cutting off the sales pitch. She had bought exactly what she planned: a couple of plain white t-shirts, not washed to the hospital's basic grey, a pair of black jeans that would even do for clinic duty, a couple of dark blue button-down shirts that wouldn't conceal Greg's collar (since that was going to be a contentious point): and the cheapest pair of black shoes the store had in Greg's size. She had bought a standard pack of underwear and socks. She had spent more than that on dinner for two in a good restaurant, and this outfit was like nothing she had ever seen any of the hospital's slaves wear. That was just what she wanted.

She had the sales assistant shackle Greg up again, and gave Greg the bag of clothing to carry as, slowly, they walked out to the car. Greg walked obediently on the leash: Cuddy rather thought she needn't have bothered with the shackles. She stopped on the way back to buy a sandwich for lunch, and, glancing at Greg in the car, bought two. Good behavior ought to be rewarded.

Back in her office, she provided him with a notepad again, and instructed him to write a job description for the Diagnostics fellowship: then to provide her with a list of journals and reference books the department would need. When she had her lunch, she gave him the sandwich she'd bought for him, and sent him down the hall to the oncology lounge for two cups of coffee. For most of the time, however, he sat on the floor and worked hard: at five past three, remembering Mrs Foster's arrival yesterday, Cuddy told him to stop, to go to the exercise field and work out for an hour, and then to shower, change into the new shoes and clothing she had bought for him, and come back here: "I expect you back here by four-thirty, understood?"

Greg looked a little sulky, but he went. Cuddy looked over his work and was pleased: Greg had come up with a sensible list of materials. She didn't want to spend Sunday at the hospital too, but she didn't want to have Greg back on a Sanitation detail: she called the overseer on duty for the weekend, and outlined what she expected.

"It's extremely bad practice to have a healthy slave simply exempted from work," the overseer said, sounding harried.

"Greg _will_ be working," Cuddy said. "I've assigned him an office: he's to spend the day in there, except for meals and exercise, doing the reading I've assigned him. That's his work for tomorrow. I will check personally to ensure he has carried out his assigned tasks on Monday."

"I will have to let Doris Foster know about this," the woman said.

"If Mrs Foster has anything to say about the tasks I've assigned to a slave under my supervision, she should speak to me directly," Cuddy said. "I'll send her a memo to let her know I have assigned Greg the work I want him to get done this weekend."

Greg was back on time. He was wearing the clothes she'd bought, and had the hospital clothes bagged. Cuddy gave him the assigned reading list for tomorrow.

"We'll get the materials out of the hospital library now, and you can take them down to the Diagnostics office for tomorrow," she instructed him. "You're to spend your working day in there reading and taking notes, except when you have a meal break or an exercise break."

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said, a blank small voice that Cuddy was beginning to get used to: he sounded so unlike the Greg House she remembered, so completely passive and and accepting.

Cuddy let Greg browse the hospital library shelves until he had a pile of materials to work on she judged impossible for him to complete in one day. "Don't worry, I won't punish you for not finishing all of this tomorrow," she told him.

"Thank you, ma'am," he said quietly. Cuddy gave him a look. That could have been sarcasm: it certainly would have been from Doctor House, once upon a time.

"Just work at it steadily and get through everything you can."

Greg nodded. He was holding the stack of material carefully in his arms. "Please, ma'am," he said, very quietly. "Could... could this slave not go to exercise tomorrow?" He swallowed. He was trembling. "This slave could finish this ..."

Cuddy really laughed. This had to be sarcasm. She had never expected to hear Doctor House beg off exercise, or refer to himself in the third person as "this slave".

"No, you cannot," Cuddy said. She was still amused, but she'd stopped laughing. "I told Mrs Foster you were perfectly capable of keeping yourself fed, clean, and exercised. Don't miss your meals or your exercise, and don't get your clothes dirty with 'Sanitation' work again."

Greg stacked the journals and books, a notepad and a couple of pens, neatly on one of the chairs. The room had been left unlocked as it was officially disused: Cuddy had got a key from the building supervisor, and locked the door. She handed the key to Greg. "Report to my office at seven on Monday morning, with this key and your notebook." She smiled. "Don't let anyone shave your head, either."

"No, ma'am," Greg said in a quiet voice.

Cuddy walked out of PPTH with a light heart. This was going to work, after all.

_tbc - Tailkinker will post Day 2 of Greg's story tomorrow, and I'll post Day 3 the next day. Hope you like it so far!_


	4. Day 3

_This is the story of Greg House's first sixteen days at PPTH in the Collar Redux universe: the story starts where "Seven Stages" leaves off, and you probably need to read that first. This story is set in a universe where there are slaves, and Greg House is one of them. It's fairly dark, there is abuse, discipline, dubcon, noncon, etc, etc, etc. Don't like, don't read. Parallel story told from Greg's POV over at Tailkinker's profile: we're posting alternate days._

**Day Three (Sunday)**

**_1. Slave_**

The alarm rang and Jon woke. He was up and scrambling into his clothes before he remembered: today was Sunday. They'd have to clean the whole of the basement that morning, starting with their dorms, but there was usually a treat with breakfast, and the rest of the work was easier today because there were fewer free people in the hospital.

The new slave, Doctor Cuddy's favorite, was dressing in the clothes she'd bought for him - smart clothes, something like what the clerical slaves wore during their office work hours. Jon supposed he could just let him walk out the door to get caned, but he was feeling good about it being Sunday, and it wasn't like any slave had a choice about it if one of the staff decided they wanted you. Mr Johnson was always picking out male slaves he liked to help him "clean up" at the end of a shift: Jon had been screwed by him a couple of times. Doctor Cuddy might like her new pet and want to dress him up, but she wouldn't be in the hospital on Sunday to see him.

"Hey," Jon whispered. The new slave ignored him. He never had said what his name was, but Mr Johnson had called him Greg. "Hey Greg," Jon said, very quietly.

The new slave gave him a closed-off look. He pulled on a button-down shirt and began fastening it.

"You need to get into your regular clothes," Jon said, still quietly. "We've all got to clean the basement this morning."

The door opened. Greg didn't answer: he was dressed now and he headed towards the door just as if he hadn't heard. Jon shrugged, he'd tried: he slipped his shoes on and followed Greg out. They had to get the cleaning kits, strip the bunks, drop their bedding in the laundry - not every slave did sanitation detail on Sunday morning, but most of them, and it wasn't like Greg wasn't able to clean. He hadn't worked a full shift yet, but he'd done six hours Friday and five hours Saturday before Doctor Cuddy took him away, and he'd worked hard when he was there.

Not altogether to Jon's surprise, Greg was going in the wrong direction - down the hall to the stairs up to the main part of the hospital, not back to where they got their cleaning kits. One other dayshift dorm had already been released, and the night shift dorms were already at work, and Jon supposed Greg would get leashed and brought back soon enough, to get a caning from Mrs Foster on Monday.

Jon didn't see Greg again till they were going into the canteen for their meal: he joined them almost too late, still wearing his smart clothes, obviously not having done any work to get them dirty. They got hot cereal with dried fruit on good days and with a kind of mess of stewed vegetable on bad days, and there was always bread, and on Sundays there was usually something else - today there was jam and cheese, cheese in hunks and jam in big cans each with a spoon, so you knew without asking to take a hunk of cheese and as big a spoonful of jam as you could get on your plate. Jon helped himself and sat down, and the new slave copied him and sat down at the same table. Danny got handed a bowlful of pellets by the server and looked stupidly disappointed - no matter how many times he earned a punishment, he never seemed to learn that he wouldn't get exceptions by looking sad about it.

Jon put the cheese on one slice of bread and spread the jam with the back of his spoon on the other, planted his elbow so no one could steal his food, and started eating his cereal - it was a bad day, with the kind of puree of vegetables over the hot cereal, but it was hot and filling.

Danny was taking a seat across from the new slave. He put the bowlful of pellets down on the table and looked at the new slave's plate and put on a horrified expression.

"Greg, you took cheese and jam!"

Jon lifted his head and eyed Danny. "Shut up," he mouthed. Danny had said it quietly, as if he were trying not to be heard, but he hadn't sat down and he was facing the supervisor: she'd see he'd said something, even if she didn't hear what.

"Greg, you'll get into trouble, you didn't do any work this morning," Danny said, still quietly but still on his feet. "The cheese and jam's only for slaves who _worked_."

The new slave looked down at his bowl. He'd stopped shoveling the hot cereal into his mouth: he looked up again at Danny. Of course the next move - Jon was faintly disgusted, but not sympathetic enough to say anything - would be for the new slave to panic and for Danny to offer to take care of the treats. If it worked, Danny would get some real food and the new slave wouldn't dare complain. Anyway the new guy _hadn't_ done any work this morning, though Jon had no idea how he'd got away with it.

"I worked," the new slave said.

"You didn't," Danny said more loudly. He was leaning across the table now. "We all saw, you _didn't_ do any work, you just snuck away!" His voice had risen. Jon ducked his head and went on eating his cereal as fast as he could - Danny was out to cause trouble, and sure the new slave sort of deserved it, but Danny was a stupid kid, he never worked out he'd get into trouble too, and so could any slave who was a witness.

"I worked," the new slave repeated. He sounded more sure of himself the second time. He glanced sideways at Jon and started to eat his cereal again, shoving it into his mouth with impressive speed.

"You _didn't_!" Danny said, almost squealing it: he only sat down when the door opened and the two security guards on duty came in, hands on their batons. The supervisor had obviously signalled them. She called over to them "Danny again."

"You piece of crap," one of the guards said, indistinctly. He was still eating something as he walked round the table towards Danny: his mouth was open. Jon glanced up once, seeing the angry face and the food-clogged mouth, and ducked his head and started eating his bread and cheese - he could eat that faster than the jam, and he was afraid. Danny was a stupid kid, such a stupid kid. The guard must have swallowed, because the next words were clear. "Can't you even eat breakfast in peace?" He and his colleague literally picked Danny up from the bench and put him down on the floor, on all fours.

"It was the new boy," Danny said, crying. "He took food he wasn't meant to have!"

The guards looked over at the new slave. He moved fast: he was back off the bench and on his knees on the floor with his hands behind his back, head bowed.

"You're the slave Doctor Cuddy bought," one of the guards said.

"Yes, ma'am," the new slave said, to the floor.

"Did the new boy take anything he wasn't meant to have?" the guard asked the supervisor, who came out from behind the food table and looked down at the new slave's bowl, then along the table at everyone else's bowl.

"No," she said. "And that piece of crap should go in the cage. He doesn't need to come here to get fed when he's just eating slave chow and making trouble."

One of the guards took the bowl of pellets off the table. He was grinning. He put the bowl down in front of Danny's face. "You eat that, boy. Uh-uh, don't use your hands."

"You, Greg," the other guard said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Finish your food."

Greg got back up off his knees and sat down next to Jon. He was trembling, Jon saw out of the corner of his eye. "Yes, ma'am," he said. He looked at the remains of the cereal and started to eat it, though his hand shook on the spoon. The guard came and stood behind him. "Clean your plate," she said, and waited. The canteen was quiet, apart from the noise of people eating: on the floor, Jon could just see Danny's head moving as he ate his pellets. The guard was moving his baton up and down Danny's back. Stupid, stupid kid.

Jon had finished his food before Greg had, but he didn't dare move: he sat still with his head bent over the bowl, keeping his eyes fixed on the scratches in the red plastic. Greg had picked up a blue bowl. Ted, opposite, also sitting head bent over an empty bowl, had a green one. The bowls were flat with a deep rim, you could eat out of them without using your hands if you had to, but Mrs Foster -

What color was Danny's bowl? Jon couldn't see it, couldn't remember it. When would he finish?

Stupid kid. Jon pressed his hands together under the table. Such a stupid kid. Nobody much liked him. But just a stupid kid.

When Greg's bowl was empty, the guard asked "Where did you get those clothes, boy?"

"Ma'am, Doctor Cuddy bought them for me, Ma'am." That was the same thing Greg had said yesterday to Mr Johnson, he'd even claimed Doctor Cuddy had taken him out of the hospital to buy them.

"And who told you to wear them this morning?"

"Ma'am, Doctor Cuddy bought them for me to wear, ma'am."

"But Doctor Cuddy isn't here to see you, so what made you think you should wear those clothes?"

Greg twitched all over. "Sorry, ma'am," he said, stammering. "This slave - this slave didn't know - Doctor Cuddy told me - "

"All right," the guard said, seeming to relent. But then she put one hand on Greg's shoulder and tapped lightly against the side of Greg's head with her baton. "Now how did you manage to get your cleaning duties done without spoiling those smart new clothes?"

Jon was surprised that Greg actually sounded less scared, like he didn't understand what kind of trouble he was in. "Ma'am, Doctor Cuddy assigned this slave work to do all day today, ma'am."

"_All_ day?" The guard tapped the baton again, lightly, but Jon could hear it click against Greg's skull.

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said. He sounded quite clear and self-confident suddenly. "Doctor Cuddy was quite specific: I'm to do the work she set all day. Ma'am."

"Let's get this piece of crap to the cage," the other guard said. He hauled Danny to his feet by one arm. Danny had been crying, silently: his face was a mess with tears and bits of pellets.

"Okay," the guard said, apparently losing interest in Greg, though she added "We'll talk to Mrs Foster about you." They got hold of Danny by both his arms, and dragged him out.

The supervisor banged on the edge of the serving table. "Everybody out before I report you all for being late."

No one said a word. Jon saw Greg stumble and recover on his way out of the canteen: someone probably shoved him. Jon wasn't surprised at all that he didn't see him for the rest of the day - not until, a minute or so before the door was due to be locked for the night, Greg slipped into the dorm. He stripped off fast and got into his bunk. Jon was aware of the empty bunk across the room where Danny should have been sleeping, like a hole in a hollow tooth.

Stupid, stupid, stupid kid.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**2. Security**_

PPTH wasn't one of the big hospitals that was busy 24/7. The ER was open 24/7 obviously, but Princeton General was a bigger hospital with a larger ER. The free clinic got a fair amount of walk-ins, which made Saturday morning as busy as any weekday, but on Sunday, the building was pretty quiet by comparison. The slaves who cleaned the building were a bit more visible, and Anna didn't like to look at them: she'd never volunteered for slave supervision, even though there was the chance of higher pay.

But even so, Anna liked working the Sunday dayshift. You got a couple of extra bucks per hour, Connor looked after the kids, and they liked getting to spend the whole day with just their dad. If something went wrong on Sunday it could be pretty bad - but mostly it was just a day of pretty easy work.

Though she was not happy to be given the job of walking the halls. Monday to Saturday, there was a staffed security station on each floor, and sitting there was reckoned to be an easy shift, though Anna found it boring: the first floor, where the guards kept track of people entering and leaving, was more interesting. Sunday, the administration didn't reckon they needed to have two security people permanently on each floor, they just had a couple of guards walking around the whole upper floors of the hospital, everywhere except the mother-and-baby unit, which always had security staff on the door.

She was walking down the second-floor hall when she saw that a light was on in one of the disused offices. Anna glanced in: the room was empty aside from a couple of chairs. The office had been standing empty for a little while, and she knew that it was being used as an informal lunchroom, which was OK, and smoking area, which was strictly against the rules. She tried the door: it was locked. She rattled it and knocked, but as she'd expected, got no answer: last person in had forgotten to turn the light off. She shrugged and walked on.

Back up to the top floor and down again, floor by floor: the whole route, which she was allowed to vary, took her about an hour. It wasn't really interesting. She saw the light was still on in the office when she got back to the second floor. It was possible that a couple of medical students had got hold of a key and were using the disused office to set up some kind of practical joke. Anyway she could say she'd thought that if anyone asked. She stopped at the security station to get the master key set, and came back to unlock the door.

The room wasn't empty. There was a male slave sitting on the floor under the window, where he was invisible from the hall, with a pile of books. He was reading one of the books and seemed to be writing in a notebook. He looked up when she came in, and for an instant she thought he was going to ask _her_ what she was doing here.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Anna asked. Everything seemed to have gone slow: she felt as if she were speaking slowly, as if she had time to see and consider everything. A runaway? Why would he have books instead of food or weapons? Maybe he did have weapons, under the books? Anna didn't carry a taser-baton like the guards who worked with slaves, but she did have a gun, though she'd never used it except in mandatory training sessions, and she realized that her hand was on it. He wasn't acting afraid. "You. I'm talking to you, boy. Get down on to your face. Keep your hands out where I can see them. Slowly, I don't want to see any quick moves."

She really didn't. She'd never shot anyone. Not even a slave.

The slave sort of rolled over on to his face and lay there. His hands were pushed out, empty, flat on the carpet. "Crawl. Stay on your belly. Move into the middle of the floor." He was obeying her, and Anna was actually relieved. She kicked the books over, carefully, but the stack was nothing but books, and when she bent to check, they were medical type books, the property of PPTH library.

"Stay still, boy," she told him, and ran her hands over him, checking for hidden weapons. The only odd thing was a key tucked into one of his jeans pockets. "All right. Who do you belong to? What are you doing here?"

The slave didn't answer for a minute. He was shaking and his voice had a stammer. "Ma'am, this slave... this slave was told to be here ..."

"Who do you belong to? What department?" He was wearing the kind of clothes you'd see on a slave who didn't do heavy labor, so he was probably a clerical worker of some kind, but there was no way he was supposed to be sitting by himself in a disused office reading books.

"Doctor Cuddy bought me. I belong to the Diagnostics department."

There was an administrator called Doctor Cuddy, but there was no Diagnostics department at PPTH. "Who told you to say that? Who put you in here?"

"Doctor Cuddy told me to work here today," the slave said.

"Right," Anna said. "What does 'Doctor Cuddy' look like?"

"She's five foot four, but she usually wears heels to make her seem taller, she has dark brown hair, blue eyes, she's non-practicing Jewish, her given name's Lisa, she went to the university of Michigan..."

"And she bought you?" Anna cut him off. She was beginning to get the picture. "And she told you that you could skip work today, just sit in here and look at books?"

"Yes, ma'am," the slave said.

"Who put you in here? Who locked the door?" Anna paused, remembering the key in the slave's pocket. "Did _you_ lock the door?"

"Yes, ma'am," the slave said. "Doctor Cuddy gave me the key. This is going to be the Diagnostics department office."

"What exactly did Doctor Cuddy tell you to do?" Anna stepped back. "You can get up on to your knees, boy. Hands behind your back."

The slave obeyed her. He was quite good-looking, Anna supposed, if you could bring yourself to touch a slave. He wasn't tagged. Head ducked, he told her that he'd been ordered to spend all day in this office, studying the books Doctor Cuddy had given him.

"Give me the key," Anna told him. He hesitated. Anna was annoyed. "Come on, hand it over."

After a long moment he fished the key out of his pocket and held it out to her. He looked sulky. Anna took the key. "All right, get back to looking at your books." She walked out and locked the door behind her. At the security station, she called the head of shift, who agreed she'd done the right thing: the situation would need to be reported to Doris Foster on Monday, and Foster would check the story the slave had told with Doctor Cuddy: the head of shift would check the slave's status with the overseer on duty this weekend. "Hand the key in to this office, when you go off shift, and I'll make sure someone escorts him down to his dorm before it's locked up for the night."

_tbc - Tailkinker will post Day 3 of Greg's story tomorrow, and I'll post Day 4 the next day._


	5. Day 4

_This is the story of Greg House's first sixteen days at PPTH in the Collar Redux universe: the story starts where "Seven Stages" leaves off, and you probably need to read that first. This story is set in a universe where there are slaves, and Greg House is one of them. It's fairly dark, there is abuse, discipline, dubcon, noncon, etc, etc, etc. Don't like, don't read. Parallel story told from Greg's POV over at Tailkinker's profile: we're posting alternate days. If you're enjoying the story (if enjoying's the word) please comment, we love to hear from you!  
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**Day Four (Monday)**

_**1. Danny**_

The cage was just long enough to lie down in and just high enough to sit up in and just wide enough for him to curl up in. The floor was metal and the bars were too close together to get his hand between them, and the door was latched where he couldn't reach it. The cage was in a corner of the security station in the basement, Danny had seen it before but it was always empty. The guards put cups of coffee on it, and memos, and used it like a table. They took his clothes off and cuffed his arms and shackled his legs and shoved him into the cage. He thought he was bleeding but when he could get his head round to squint at his sides he was just scraped and cold.

They told him to be quiet and he tried, he knew how much trouble he was in. After a while they took him out, but only to put a gag in his mouth, then they put him back in the cage. He was still crying but the mouthpiece of the gag held his jaws open. Paul wouldn't let them treat him like this, if Paul knew he would be so mad...

It wasn't fair. His handler at the Center had told him to be good and do what he was told and work at whatever he was told to do, and for nine years everything had been fine and Paul had liked him and Mr and Mrs Sanders had liked him - and then they'd sold him here and nobody liked him. His hands and his knees were starting to look all raggedy and rough because he was told to crawl to get things clean underneath, and there was never any fun, the older slaves sometimes snuck off and did things like drink or read old magazines or have sex, but Danny had never liked reading, and he didn't see the point of having sex for fun with other slaves, and though he liked the feeling of being drunk, of not having to think about anything, the other slaves would never let him have much, he never had anything they wanted to trade.

He needed to use the bathroom. Once he thought about it he couldn't think about anything else. How long had he been in here? Hours? If they let him out now he'd work hard, he wouldn't make a fuss. Even about not having cheese and jam on Sunday morning, when he'd worked hard for hours and that new slave had just dressed up fancy and snuck off to sit around. He needed to use the bathroom. He couldn't tell them because he had a gag in his mouth. He'd get into even worse trouble if he dirtied the cage.

He got hauled out after a long time of trying not to let go, and a guard took him to a bathroom and let him use one of the stalls, with the door open. The guard wiped his ass for him and made a joke to one of the other guards when he got back, about how he stank. It wasn't fair, anyone would stink. They didn't take the gag out and he was thirsty now. If he was at work he could take a drink of water from the bathroom taps, almost any time he wanted. He kept thinking about that, about being able to put his cupped hand under the tap and drink water, about not having the gag in his mouth. He would work hard.

It was late when they eventually took him out - he saw a clock, it was nearly time for showers and bed. He needed to get his clean clothes for next week. He'd be good. He'd suck them both off and not make a fuss about it if they just let him go back to his bunk, he wouldn't even complain if he didn't get clean clothes. If he had to wear his stinky clothes all next week.

One of the guards took him into Mrs Foster's office, but she wasn't there. The man who was there, Mr Gonzales, one of the other overseers, took his gag out, and got a bag of slave chow out of the cupboard, and tipped some into a bowl, and told him to eat it.

Danny's jaw hurt and his mouth was dry. It was hard to eat the dry chow. At least he was allowed to use his hands, even if they were cuffed together. Then he got a bottle of water. And then Mr Gonzalez said, "Take him back to the cage," and Danny sobbed, he couldn't help it, and begged out loud, "Please no, please - no - no - I'll be good, you don't have to, don't - "

"Don't leave the gag in overnight," Mr Gonzalez said, sounding tired. "I know what the night shift's like, you won't have someone in the room with him all the time, so no gag."

The guard kicked him, hard, he was sure there would be a bruise, and Mrs Foster didn't like it when they showed up bruised. The cage felt just as cold and miserable now he wasn't hungry. He was sure he couldn't sleep, but some time, between one blink and the next, the cage ceiling was made of wires and the wires were crossing the light in the office ceiling, and he saw one of the guards put her coffee mug down on it, and say something to one of the other guards about her shifts next weekend. It was Monday morning and he was still in the cage and he hadn't done any work and he was in so much trouble. Paul would be mad if he saw.

It was like a cold flood working through him, as if cold coffee had been spilled over him. Paul knew they were going to sell him. The Sanders had sold him eighteen months ago, when Paul went off to college, and Paul had hugged him goodbye before he left: he never had hugged goodbye before. The van from the hospital had got there later the same day and picked him up, and he'd told himself and the other slaves all sorts of stories about why they had to sell him, but really: they'd just sold him like Paul clearing out his old toys to give to Goodwill. Paul could have found him, if he'd wanted to, PPTH was in New Jersey, the van had driven ages picking up other slaves, but he'd seen New Jersey on the map, it wasn't a big state. Paul wouldn't ever know Danny was naked in a cage, was being made to clean floors and run hurdles naked and get fucked by free men sometimes, because Paul had given Danny away, and wasn't thinking about him any more.

The new slave is kneeling by the cage. He's got a bowl of slave chow in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. He's wearing dirty work clothes. He's looking at Danny and he looks very sad.

_*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*_

_**2. Overseer**_

Nic Gonzalez was a calm and reliable overseer: when he was on duty over the weekend, Doris didn't get called in. His memo was on the top of the pile on her desk, and in three paragraphs, clearly written Sunday evening, he summarised the problems of the weekend: Doctor Cuddy hadn't kept either security staff or slave overseers in the loop about her orders for Greg: Greg was claiming the authority of Doctor Cuddy's orders for a series of alarmingly-independent actions: and Danny had once again been disruptive, though claiming provocation because Greg had slipped away upstairs without doing any of the usual Sunday morning work.

Danny was in the cage in the basement security section, and the memo immediately underneath was a strong suggestion from Nic, supported by Zoe Washington, who'd been on supervision duty in the slave canteen at the time, that Danny should be treated as irrecuperable and sold on. Doris made a face: this was the third such memo she'd got about Danny over the past year, and the problem was still that Mason and Catherine Sanders were big donors: they might never ask again about the slave they'd sold to PPTH, but if they did, Doris had been told, they'd want a satisfactory answer - something better than "you spoiled him for real work and we had to sell him".

Underneath that, were five memos about Greg: two dated Saturday, one from Doctor Cuddy saying that Greg was the property of the Diagnostics department and he was to be treated as such from now on - whatever that meant: one from Matthew Johnson, saying Greg had excused himself for lateness and from clean-up after exercise by claiming "Orders from Doctor Cuddy", and that he'd been wearing new clothes, not the standard hospital brands, which he'd claimed Doctor Cuddy had bought for him on a shopping trip she'd taken him on. Three more dated Sunday: Greg had avoided the usual work, dressed himself up for Doctor Cuddy even though she wouldn't be in on Sunday, and caused a disruption in the canteen: a brief one saying Greg had missed his Sunday afternoon exercise session: and a longer one from the security department: Greg had locked himself in an empty office upstairs and apparently spent the day there, claiming Doctor Cuddy gave him the key and told him to sit in the office and study. A security guard had locked him in after she found him about three o'clock. And he'd missed dinner: Nic had presumably fed him when he was finally brought downstairs, and packed him off to his bunk just before locking up time.

Doris called the basement security section. "Can you find me Greg, and bring him to my office?" she asked.

"Sure," the guard said. "He's in here."

"Why?"

"Canteen supervisor sent him in with chow and water for Danny," the guard said. "He just came in and dropped on his knees when he saw the cage." He must have turned his head away from the phone, because his next words were louder but muffled. "Hey! Get the big boy back on his feet, Mrs Foster wants to see him." Back to the phone, "Sorry, Mrs Foster. He's a big guy, and he's acting like he doesn't want to stand up right now."

"Is he drunk?"

"No," the guard said, with a snorted chuckle. "No, he's just kind of curled up on himself like he was a big dog, shaking like a jelly, but he's not drunk."

"Get him through to my office if you have to drag him," Doris said wearily. She glanced at the clock: barely after seven. Doctor Cuddy might be in already, but most likely was not yet at her desk. She disconnected the call and dialed the ER. "When you have time, can you send down a nurse with a blood draw kit?"

Greg was dragged in to her office and Doris indicated the loop in the wall to fasten the end of a leash to: he wasn't wearing "special" clothes, he was wearing the illfitting jeans and a stained t-shirt and a flip-flop sandal. One of the guards came back with the other one a moment later, chucking it at the slave: "Sorry, this fell off as we were getting him along the hall."

"Thanks," Doris said. The nurse from ER arrived a few minutes later: she took a blood draw and went off to run a tox and alcohol screen. She agreed with the guard that Greg didn't look drunk or drugged, but he was white and shaking and leaking tears. When the nurse had gone, she saw the slave's eyes fix on the clock on the wall.

"Ma'am," he said. "Need... this slave needs, I'm supposed... this slave should report to Doctor Cuddy. I'm late. I was supposed to be there at seven." He sounded faint and wobbly, but strangely sure of himself.

"What were Doctor Cuddy's orders for you yesterday?"

There was a pause. "She told me to read and take notes in the Diagnostics office, ma'am. She, she gave me a key to the office, one of the guards took it, I'm supposed to report to her at seven with the key and my notes..."

"Did Doctor Cuddy tell you to lock yourself into the office?"

Silence. The slave's eyes widened. Doris repeated the question. "Answer me."

"No," the slave said.

Doris nodded. "Did Doctor Cuddy give you explicit permission to avoid doing your Sunday morning cleaning duties?"

The slave's eyes rolled, as if seeking escape. Finally he whispered "No."

Doris kept a light cane in her office. She felt that a large part of the problems Greg had caused yesterday were due to Doctor Cuddy's bad handling of the situation, but it was unacceptable for the slave not to be punished somewhat for the disruption he'd caused. A docile well-behaved slave would have asked permission before going upstairs by himself: and on Friday, Doris would have said Greg was one of those slaves.

"Take deep breaths and calm down, Greg," she instructed him. She was fairly sure now that he wasn't either drunk or drugged. "Why are you so upset?"

The slave swallowed hard. "Please... Danny. The boy... in the cage. Why is he... what's going to happen to him...?"

"Danny's in the cage because he's continuously disruptive and lazy," Doris told him. "He'll be punished later. How is none of your business. I'm sure you never want to have to be caged."

The slave shook his head. He was crying now, he looked as if he was trying to huddle up - "like a big dog," the guard had said.

"Greg," she said sharply.

"The child," the slave said, in a small and distant voice. "I couldn't save the child..."

Danny wasn't a child, he was nearly twenty. A thought occurred to Doris like a light switching on. The Sanders had apparently always planned to get rid of Danny when their only son went off to college. She got up and went over to the filing cabinets with the slave records, and found Danny's file. She returned to her desk, glancing at Greg. "Deep breaths and calm down," she reminded him. "I'll deal with you in about twenty minutes, and I'll call Doctor Cuddy." She'd cane him four times; two strokes for missing Sunday morning cleaning, two strokes for locking himself into the office. Most of the rest would likely turn out to be Doctor Cuddy's responsibility for giving Greg disruptive orders. Meantime, she had a transfer order to write for Danny: she thought she had an idea that resolved the situation. By the time she'd finished writing it, she thought Greg would be calmer and she'd see how he reacted to a light caning.

_*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*_

**_3. Supervisor_**

Gr eg was not waiting outside Cuddy's office when she got into work sharp at seven: and he had not shown up about ten minutes later, when she was out of her coat and drinking her first coffee of the day as she opened her interdepartmental mail.

Almost at the top of the pile was an interdepartmental envelope containing a key and a memo from the second layer of copy paper, addressed to Mrs Foster, about finding a slave in a second floor office and locking him in there. The key was presumably the one she'd given Greg.

Cuddy was annoyed: she'd left instructions with Mrs Foster about having Greg treated as the property of the Diagnostics department, and she'd given Greg very clear instructions about what to do on Sunday. She went down to the second-floor office and unlocked the door. The books were in a neat stack on the floor by the internal wall, and the notebook on the floor by them, with both pens. Cuddy picked the notebook up and glanced at her watch: it was barely seven-thirty, Mrs Foster was probably not yet at work.

She leafed through the notebook on her way back up in the elevator, and was impressed: Greg had done quite a bit of work, and he'd done it intelligently. She'd been thinking of his study day as revision: as Greg House's medical license had been deactivated less than three months ago, the medical licensing board in New Jersey didn't _have_ to require him to sit a test, but they could, either oral or written, and she wanted to make sure Greg was prepared to pass it. But Greg had instead written what was effectively the outline of a paper on Diagnostics as a brand-new speciality. If he could finish this within the next few days as a first draft, she'd have it typed up for presentation to the Board, and if Greg could polish it to publication standards within the month, it might see print about the time the Board would be considering whether to extend the Diagnostic department's funding for a full three-year period.

She left the notebook on the secretary's desk with a note asking her to type it up, and found a new message on her answering machine from Mrs Foster, requesting an urgent meeting to discuss Greg's behavior over the weekend. Doctor Cuddy called back, and got Mrs Foster's answering machine: she left a message urgently requesting Greg in her office, properly dressed, as soon as he was available.

Mrs Foster appeared within about twenty minutes, without Greg. She walked into Cuddy's office, closed the door, and demanded to know exactly what orders Cuddy had given Greg for the weekend.

Cuddy leaned back her chair and looked Foster over calmly. Foster was carrying an interdepartmental brown envelope, presumably with another memo. "As I told you in the memo I sent you on Saturday morning, Greg is the property of the Diagnostics department, and I expect him to be treated as such."

"Did you take him out of the hospital for a shopping trip on Saturday morning?"

"I'm his supervisor," Cuddy said. "He needed clothes that fit and proper shoes. I appreciate that you have something appropriate on order, but I wanted to make sure that he had suitable clothes right away."

"Did you authorize him to make use of a second-floor office all day on Sunday?"

"I don't care for the tone of your questions, Mrs Foster. Yes, he was supposed to spend his entire working day on material I had given him to review, and he did just that: I'm very pleased with him. The office is the one that is assigned to the Diagnostics department: there should be a sign on the door by the end of this week, I've put in a request to maintenance, but you know how they are." She smiled.

Foster did not return the smile. "Did you authorize him to miss his exercise session on Sunday?"

"No, I did not," Cuddy said. "In fact, I specifically ordered him to make sure he ate, exercised, and cleaned himself."

Foster sighed. She sat down, putting the envelope down on the floor beside her. "Doctor Cuddy, either I or one of the other overseers should know where any slave in this hospital is supposed to be at any time." She sounded quite patient and calm: Cuddy eyed her, not trusting this sudden change. "We can inform any other member of staff - especially the security staff - where they should expect to find slaves. The reason for this is not just so that slaves find it difficult to absent themselves from work, and impossible to run away." She leaned forward over Cuddy's desk, and her voice was suddenly very cold. "It's because slaves who are found in unexpected places, are much more likely to get hurt."

Cuddy smiled and leaned back in her chair. She glanced at her watch. "Mrs Foster," she said calmly, "I'm sure we both have the best interests of the hospital at heart. Greg is now nearly ninety minutes late in reporting himself to me, which I'm assuming for the moment is not his fault, and he has a lot of work to get through today and the rest of the week. Until his medical license is reactivated, Greg should always be either in the Diagnostics office, here in my office or otherwise under my direct supervision, or of course at his meals or at exercise or in his dorm. I hope you can make that clear to whoever you feel needs to know it."

"Greg must follow a set schedule. It's disruptive to the other slaves to have him acting as if he can go where he likes, when he likes."

"He won't be able to follow a set schedule when he's practicing as a doctor, and I'd like you to give some thought to how we can best arrange that. But I've agreed that for the next two weeks he should follow the schedule you've set down for meals, exercise, and sleep: but he is the property of Diagnostics, and his work schedule is _mine_ to set. Did you say he missed his exercise session on Sunday?"

"Yes," Foster agreed with a frown.

"You rejected the idea of his carrying a pager. If you had been able to page him, you would of course have been able to find him on Sunday, and so would whoever supervises the exercise sessions." Cuddy smiled. "Office furniture for Diagnostics should be arriving this week. It should include a clock. Greg will have no excuse for being late for his exercise sessions or missing them."

Foster nodded, eyeing Cuddy, still frowning. "Are you aware that it's being said you bought Greg for your own... personal use?"

"That's absurd," Cuddy said. "He was bought by the hospital."

"You've shown him a remarkable degree of favoritism. You've taken him out of the hospital on a shopping trip, you bought him clothes, and he responds to every query with 'Doctor Cuddy says'." Foster looked sympathetic. "Perhaps you're not aware, Doctor Cuddy, how easily a rumor like that gets attached to a career woman. I take care to show no favoritism to any slave, to allow no personal attachment."

"I don't have a personal attachment to Greg," Cuddy said flatly. "We were at the same medical school, but years apart. I barely knew him, except by reputation."

Foster smiled. "It's unfair, of course - men do find it easier to make use of slaves without being thought of as having an undue attachment, but it's an unfair world, don't you think?"

The question fell in silence. Cuddy waited. She could recognise an approach when she heard one.

"There's another slave who causes quite a bit of trouble right now," Foster said. "Were you aware that on Sunday mornings most of the hospital slaves are assigned to clean the basement?"

Cuddy shrugged, lifting her hand: she hadn't known, and she couldn't see why she should care.

"Greg didn't. He went upstairs to your 'Diagnostics office'," and didn't reappear again till his dorm were going into the canteen."

"He was following my orders," Cuddy said blandly.

"One of the younger slaves, who was spoiled by his last owner - a young man who let his slave slack off, do very much as he liked, because of a personal attachment - made a fuss over Greg getting the Sunday morning treats when he hadn't done any of the work. I've had three requests to get rid of this particular slave since we bought him."

"Well?"

"He used to be the property of Mr and Mrs Sanders. They sold him to the hospital."

The Sanders Infant ICU was named for them. Cuddy nodded. She'd met them at a couple of parties for donors, a nice couple.

"We can't simply sell him on," Foster said dryly. "But I find he's not yet twenty, and the Sanders never exercised their option to send him to the New Jersey Slaves Administration Center for further processing, adult education and training, when he turned eighteen. We can do so at any time before his twentieth birthday for a small fee, and we can ask their Sales department to find him a place more suitable to his training and work skills."

"That sounds like a reasonable solution," Cuddy agreed.

Foster put the envelope on the desk. "I've written up the transfer form," she said. "It's been signed by myself and by his supervisor, Ryan Williams. All that's needed is formal administrative approval."

"I'll give it my attention," Cuddy said. "Now with regard to Greg - I expect him to be at work in the Diagnostics office each morning till eight, with a break for his meal. I want him to report to me at eight sharp, and then he'll work either here or in Diagnostics for the rest of the day, except when he's either in the canteen or at exercise. If he misses a meal or an exercise session in future, please discipline him appropriately. I'll make that clear to Greg, and I don't want to hear of his having difficulties with any of your staff or the security staff in future."

Foster looked mildly interested. "My staff, of course... but surely you could send a memo to the head of security, Doctor Cuddy?"

Cuddy smiled. She thought Foster was savvy enough to guess why Cuddy had no wish to send any such memo: she didn't want to appear to be taking for granted the establishment of the Diagnostics department until she had Board approval, and at the moment, Greg wouldn't make any kind of good impression on the other Board members. "When did you want me to make time to give this form my attention, Mrs Foster?" She tapped the envelope.

"I'd appreciate your doing that today... and I'll certainly let the head of security know about the new slave's schedule."

"Thank you," Cuddy said.

Soon after Foster had gone, the secretary handed her the typed-up pages from Greg's notebook, and some time after Foster had time to reach the basement, Greg appeared, clean, wearing the clothes she'd bought for him. She scolded him a little for missing his exercise session Sunday, and told him what his new schedule was. "Write this up as a paper," she said, handing him the notes. "I want a first draft by Friday." She had a cheap alarm clock in her desk, she'd bought it as a student. She handed it to him, with the key to the Diagnostics office. "Office furniture should be delivered this week, including a clock, but you can use this till then. Don't lock the door from the inside, that seems to cause problems with security. Lock it when you leave the room, of course."

Greg glanced round her office - a much nicer space that the cramped room for Diagnostics, of course, with an outside window and a balcony. "Ma'am... can this slave work here?"

"No," Cuddy said. Mrs Foster was absolutely right about one thing, she couldn't afford any sign of personal attachment. "You have an office, you'll work there. I want to see you every morning at eight. If you have any difficulty with the staff, report it to Mrs Foster. If you need access to the library, you can leave a request in my in-tray."

_*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*_

**_4. Jon_**

Someone saw the van from the Center arrive. The word spread round the hospital from slave to slave faster than the free people could have phoned it.

The bailiffs from the Center went down to the basement, and someone saw them leave: they were taking one slave with them. Jon knew who it was, even before someone reported that they'd taken the kid who was in the cage: Danny was gone.

Jon hadn't even liked him. Danny was lazy, he didn't know how to get along, he was stupid, he couldn't be trusted. The handlers at the Center wouldn't care. Jon hated to think about what was happening to Danny now.

In the dorm at five-thirty, Mrs Foster was rearranging bunks: Jon had been reassigned to Danny's old bunk, and Greg had a new locker, a big one, and a lot of new clothes. Mrs Foster gave him a set of tags and told him to fix them on. She told Kev to show Greg how, and then sent him for one of her canes.

When Greg was bent over his bunk, ass bared, Jon saw he had been caned four times already today. "This is for missing yesterday's exercise," Mrs Foster said, and added two more strokes.

Greg didn't cry out or even grunt. He thanked Mrs Foster, as she expected, and got to his feet as she left, pulling up his pants over the cane marks. Kev told him sharply to pay attention, and showed him how to set the tags unobtrusively in the seams of clothing, so he'd get the clothes bought for him back from the laundry. "Sit down and get on with it," Kev said, and when Greg knelt to the job, Kev said jeeringly, "You'll have to sit in the canteen whether you like it or not, boy, so you might as well get used to it!"

Greg said nothing. He looked across the room at Jon, resting in what had been Danny's bunk. His face was expressionless. Danny would probably have been sold eventually whether or not Greg had caused trouble yesterday. The kid couldn't learn. But Greg didn't even look sorry: he just glanced at Jon, and turned his attention back to the task he'd been set.

_tbc - Tailkinker will post Day 4 of Greg's story tomorrow, and I'll post Day 5 the next day. R&R, because RAL (Reviews Are Love).  
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	6. Day 5

_This is Greg House's first sixteen days at PPTH in the Collar Redux universe _(where there are slaves, and Greg House is one of them, and so it's fairly dark, with abuse, discipline, dubcon, noncon, etc, etc, etc. Don't like, don't read_, etc) but the story starts where "Seven Stages" leaves off, and you probably need to read that first, though if you haven't and you just dropped in right now, well, enjoy the dubcon shaving scenes. Parallel story told from Greg's POV over at Tailkinker's profile: we're posting alternate days. If you're enjoying the story (if enjoying's the word) please comment, we love to hear from you!_

**Day Five (Tuesday)**

_**1. Groomer**_

In the early afternoon, when he's done his early shift in the canteen, Nathan Perez earns himself a nice extra in his paycheck. He gets to work earlier than the other canteen employees, picks up a permanent marker, a different color for each day of the week, and spends half an hour or so walking around the slave canteen and dorms, checking for slaves who don't look trim. He reckons to shave all the male slaves in the hospital at least weekly, he trims the head hair of male and female slaves when he thinks they look untidy. He writes the time they're due to report to him in the basement to be groomed on the small of their back, so their supervisors can check it, and he tells them the time when he writes it. He's a good, fast barber, and sometimes supervisors send their slaves to him (Tuesdays and Thursdays only) just for an extra tidy-up, a bit more in his pocket. But it's not just the money. He enjoys his work, it's worth the early rise to get to the hospital for six in the morning, an hour before any of the other canteen staff, and then when all the other early shift workers are going offshift, Nathan has a couple of hours of clipping and trimming.

One slave has five o'clock shadow all over his body, Nathan sees when he lifts the back of his t-shirt, and his head had been shaved bald quite recently, by the look of the growth there.

"One-thirty," Nathan tells the slave, with a pat on the back of his head. He writes the time on the slave's lower back. There's no trace of any marker writing from before. "You're new. Who's your supervisor?"

"Doctor Cuddy," the slave said in a small voice.

"Well, tell her I'll make you look nice. Main stairs to basement, second door on the right." Nathan runs his hand over the thin growth of hair on the slave's skull again, and moved on, seeing a female slave with hair falling into her eyes.

Nathan doesn't have too good a memory for names; that doesn't matter with slaves, because they all get called "boy" or "girl" anyway. He shaves or trims them fast, providing they arrive on time. They strip off, fold their clothes, lie down on the empty chair, and then the slave he's finished with sweeps up the fallen hair and bins it before getting their clothes on again and going back to work, while he's working on the slave in the other chair. There are manacles on both chairs, but Nathan doesn't like to use them: slows his pace. He prides himself that the slaves he works on don't need to be chained up, he can handle them right.

The slave who shows up at one-thirty is quite nicely dressed - Nathan tends to remember them by clothing or hair, not face, and this one doesn't look familiar till he's naked. He strips off, hesitating a bit, and Nathan laughs and tells him not to be ashamed of his body, he's a handsome fellow. He's the one who had been shaved all over, quite recently, and Nathan asks him if his supervisor wants him shaved in full again.

"No, sir," the slave says. He lies down in the chair. He looks uncomfortable. Nathan finishes trimming the other slave and lets her up. "Good girl," he tells her: she heads right for the broom and pan, and Nathan pauses a moment to appreciate her ass. He considers himself to have a professional relationship with these slaves, he wouldn't use them for sex: but there's no reason he can't look, and she has a very nice ass.

"Just hold still and relax, boy, I'll be done with you before you know it." He's got a heavy beard, this slave, he'll probably need to be shaved three times a week. "What did you say your supervisor's name was, boy?"

"Doctor Cuddy."

"Well, you tell Doctor Cuddy that if she wants to keep you shaved, she can send you to me Tuesdays or Thursdays." He pats the slave's shoulder, feeling him tremble. "Relax, boy, it's nothing to be afraid of, just making you look good." The face shaved, he needs to consider the head hair: it's growing back but does it look tidy enough? He taps the clippers against his palm, considering: the next slave is here and stripping off already, is it worth picking up the scissors?

"Sir, Doctor Cuddy didn't want my head shaved... sir." The slave's voice wobbles a bit. Nathan pats him again.

"Not going to shave your head, boy, not unless I get orders, and I might even argue if I do. I don't think you'd look good bald." The next slave is settling into the chair. "Good boy, we're all done. Clean up and get dressed, I'll see you again soon."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**2. Supervisor**_

There are only two or three pages of writing in the notebook on Tuesday morning, and they're rough, awkward, disconnected. This isn't even the start of a publishable paper.

"What on earth were you doing all day yesterday?" Cuddy said. "Did anyone make you do anything else? Cleaning work, I mean, or that kind of labor? I know you went to exercise. Anything else?"

Greg was kneeling, hands behind his back. "No, ma'am," he said.

"So you just sat in that office from eight in the morning to six at night, and all you wrote was this?"

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said.

Cuddy looked at him in annoyance. "Get up," she told him. She gave him the notebook back. "You know this isn't the standard of work I expect from you. You're not a medical student here. You don't get to slack off for days and then ace a test or turn in a perfect paper. You don't get to make your abilities an excuse for laziness. You have to work hard and consistently. We own you. This hospital owns you. We're entitled to get our full value from you."

"Yes, ma'am." Greg was on his feet, his head ducked, shoulders hunched. "Ma'am, may this slave... please may I lock the door?"

"When you're inside? No, of course not. I told you that yesterday." Cuddy frowned at him. "Why would you want to?"

"People might come in and have lunch," Greg said. It was just a whisper.

"Then tell them to leave," Cuddy said, sharply. "It's the Diagnostics office, you have a right to be there, and whoever's been using it as a lunch room certainly doesn't. Tell them to go, and tell them I said so. If they have a problem with that, they can take it up with me. You have to concentrate on your work."

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said. "Ma'am, I was told I had a one-thirty appointment today."

Cuddy said sharply, "Who could you have an appointment with I don't know about?"

"They said he was the groomer, ma'am," Greg said. He turned round and untucked his t-shirt and the button-down. On his back, printed in marker ink, was written _Tuesday 1-30_. "He said I was supposed to tell you that he'd make me look nice."

"Oh, the groomer." Cuddy realized. Of course slaves couldn't shave themselves or cut their own hair. "Well, make sure you're not late for that or for your exercise. I'll see you tomorrow at eight sharp, and no more slacking off." Evidently gossip that she'd bought Greg for personal reasons had even reached some part-time barber in the basement. She certainly couldn't show him favoritism. Besides, he would have to work unsupervised if he were capable of being what she wanted him to be.

If he was.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**3. Security**_

Charlie Edwards liked the second-floor security station, because it was never a lot of trouble. He wasn't pleased when he heard the sound of altercation from the "Diagnostics office": they'd all had word Monday that a slave, a big guy, who'd be wearing smart clothes, would be sitting in that second-floor room and shouldn't be disturbed or let other people disturb him.

The slave had left the office twice, Charlie had noticed: once to go to the bathroom, once to go to the groomer. He was nearly as tall as Charlie, and Charlie was six foot four: he was skinny, though.

A maintenance worker had gone into the office: Charlie hadn't stopped her, assuming she had work to do. She was slapping the boy's face, and he was pretty sure that wasn't the work she was here to do.

"Stop that," Charlie told her. She glared at him and got in one last slap at the slave's face, but she stopped.

"Okay. Name?"

"Sheila Hayes."

"What were you doing in here?"

"None of your business!"

"Oh come on," Charlie all but pleaded. The slave looked fine, he'd be a bit bruised, this woman hadn't hit him all that hard. "You came in for a valid reason, slave talked back to you, you slapped him to get him to shut up, we're done, case closed. You tell me something's none of my business, maybe I have to get my boss involved, maybe your boss gets involved, we have to ask questions, it's a lot of extra paperwork, and we can avoid it all just by telling me you had a good reason."

"I dropped something in here," Sheila said. "A - some jewellery. I told the slave to give it back and he wouldn't. So I hit him."

"What kind of jewellery?" Charlies asked, not believing a word of it. People didn't say "Some jewellery" when they really had lost something: they said what they'd lost, usually very specific in detail.

"A gold ring," Sheila said. "With a blue stone. A sapphire. I bet the slave swallowed it."

"Well, I'll certainly have someone check his crap for you," Charlie said. "You should fill out a lost property form so that if they find your ring in his shit it can be returned to you right away. You can get a form on the ground floor. Better go fill it in now in case this boy gets diarrhea. And maybe you'd better find somewhere else to smoke when it's raining."

She gave him a dirty look, shoving her USA Golds pack back in her pocket, but she left. Charlie eyed the slave, crouched against the wall. "You got anything to say about that, boy?"

"I told her to leave," the slave said, in a small voice. "Doctor Cuddy told me to tell her to leave. There wasn't a ring." He met Charlie's eyes. "You know there wasn't a ring."

Charlie laughed. "You told her to leave?" He eyed the slave. "What's your name, boy?"

"Greg."

"I hate paperwork, Greg. I work on this floor a lot, and if you cause me any more trouble, you're going to find out what happens to smart-ass slaves who get mouthy with me. Not with those little canes they use to whip your ass down in the basement. I'll ream you out, boy, I'll fuck the crap out of you. Got it?"

He was pleased when the slave said, just-audibly, "Yes sir," and nothing more.

"If anyone asks about those bruises, you don't know who did it. You don't want to cause me any trouble, right?"

"No sir," the slave said.

"Now shut the fuck up and get on with your reading."

The slave had the cushiest damn job Charlie had ever heard of anyone falling into; according to what Charlie's instructions were, the boy genuinely was supposed to spend his days just sitting in that office looking through a stack of books. But orders were orders, and if some administrator wanted a slave to do nothing but that, it was security's damn job to make sure no one taking an illicit smoking break stopped him from doing it.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**4. Jon**_

One of the slaves assigned to clean out a fourth-floor ward had come back with a trove: three new magazines, and a novel. The novel was by Jackie Collins: Jon expected it would circulate, in pieces, because it was too big to pocket as a whole. While Mart was arguing with the Peach, who kept their hidden stock of magazines and books, about how much the Jackie Collins novel was worth, Jon got one of the magazines for half an hour, and found himself a quiet spot to look at it: this too would circulate, the pictures fading and becoming greasy, but now it was almost pristine, only a very little creased: Jon leafed through it, looking at trees and birds, house interiors, pictures of food decoratively presented, glistening bodies about to dive into an empty swimming pool. He didn't read any of the words. He _could_ read, but he was slow at it, and he'd never get to look at all of the pictures if he tried to read the words that went with them as well.

Hannie was waiting for her chance to look at the magazine, and Jon gave it up. He went back to the dorm: he had to fix one of his t-shirts and sew the hem on one of his jeans, so he might as well do that now.

Greg was lying on his bunk, the dorm's only occupant: he was face down, and at first glance Jon wondered if he was asleep, heading into another nightmare, but he was muttering to himself, not quite lying on his face. Jon saw he had a notebook and a pen. He was writing.

Jon glanced at the camera, by habit, but right now was the time when they were least likely to be viewed: of course someone could be watching, someone could always be watching, but a time when most of the slaves were busy at "mend and repair", as they were supposed to spend this time between the last meal and showers and lights out, the dorm cameras were probably not viewed much.

"Hey, Greg," he said, in a tone of voice he tried to make friendly. It wasn't really Greg's fault that Danny got taken away.

Greg ignored him. He paused, tapped the pen on the paper and started writing again. From someone whose ass Jon had saved last night (if he'd kept on screaming in a nightmare, the guards would have come in for sure) he wasn't acting all that grateful.

"Hey," Jon said, louder, and moved so his shadow was between Greg and the light. Then Greg looked up. He didn't look friendly or grateful. "Move, would you? I want to finish this."

"Well, fuck you too," Jon said, mildly annoyed, deciding not to tell Greg that however he'd got the notebook and pen to the basement, it was worth quite a bit to several people. He picked up the clothes that needed fixed and took them down the hall to get the sewing stuff he needed: they were official issue, so he could just present them to the overseer and get what he needed. Of course not all of what he got would go back if he didn't use it; Su would deal for unused sewing stuff, and people who had damage they didn't want to talk about or unofficial clothing would deal with her.

In the dorm after Jon had done, it was nearly time to go to the showers: Greg was still writing, and Kev was crouched by his bunk, trying to run a deal for some sheets of paper and the pen, and getting the same cold shoulder Jon had got. Being Kev, he didn't take it as philosophically: he sat down on his bunk and simply waited.

Jon had seen this before. Kev would offer to trade, the new slave would refuse, Kev would wait till the slave was gone to the showers and take what he'd offered to trade. Kev would usually give the new slave what he'd originally offered to trade, a day or so later - maybe a bit less than his first offer, just to teach the new arrival a lesson: if Kev wanted to buy, new slaves didn't get to say no.

The new slave sat up suddenly, notebook and pen protected under his leg, and faced Kev. He stared at Kev for a long moment. Kev was smirking. There really wasn't anything Greg could do about it: even if he waited till the guards came to take them both to the showers tonight, Kev would get the notebook tomorrow. Greg was too new to have worked out a hiding place of his own in the basement.

"I need these notes," Greg said.

"Do you?" Kev's smirk got broader. "Writing something for Doctor Cuddy, are you?"

"Yes," Greg said, tersely. He sat there for another moment, then got to his feet, holding notebook and pen, and left the dorm. Kev got up unhurriedly and followed him. Jon guessed he'd check to see what direction Greg was going in, just to save time collecting it, but after barely half a minute, Kev came back, shaking his head. He looked stunned.

"He went to the security station," Kev said. He cast a glance over his shoulder, as if expecting guards to come in. "I saw him. He went to the door and dropped to his knees and he was holding out the notebook."

"He's crazy," Jon said, flatly. No slave went near the security station except on orders, and especially not outside Mrs Foster's working hours: the guards weren't under her authority, but she'd tell a guard off for not following her rules just the same.

"He must be." Kev puffed out a sigh through closed lips. "Damn fucking right he must be. Fucking wacko."

But when they saw Greg in the showers, he didn't look as if the guards had beaten him - he had bruises on his face, but he'd had them when he came back to the basement after exercise. He glanced at Kev, lifting his chin, and got a shove from someone else, one of Kev's friends. Greg slipped but recovered, and nothing could get too rough in the showers: the cameras there were watched.

Maybe he'd managed to come up with some excuse for having the notebook and the pen that hadn't got him into much trouble. But he'd lost it, and he wouldn't get anything for it. As they were towelling dry, Jon found himself next to Greg, and said on impulse, "If Kev had taken it, he'd have let you have what he offered in trade."

Greg looked at him. He was moving like he'd been fucked too often: Mr Johnson liked him, and the guards tonight had probably had a go. "Kev doesn't own me," he said, as quietly as Jon.

"You have to get along," Jon said. "You lost your notebook and what did you get for it?"

"I'll get it back tomorrow," Greg said. He finished drying himself, dropped the towel in the plastic bucket for laundry, and went back to the dorm.

"He really is crazy," Jon said, looking after him. He almost wished he hadn't: the others were nodding agreement. Crazy slaves got into more trouble.

But when Jon saw Greg heading upstairs to his "job" the next day, he was carrying the notebook, or one just like it. He told Kev, who looked disgusted. "Whored himself to the guards."

Jon shrugged. Kev would have done it too, if he was prettier; any slave would, if they could, trade what they had for what they could get. "Leave him alone," Jon advised. "He's Doctor Cuddy's favorite for now."

"Yeah," Kev agreed, with a look on his face that said Greg was going to see a world of trouble when he wasn't spending his days sitting in an office supervised by second floor security any more.

_tbc... look out for day 5 of Greg's Story on Tailkinker's page tomorrow, and I'll post day 6 the day after! Remember if you're enjoying it (even as a guilty pleasure, lol) we'd love to hear from you!_


	7. Day 6

_Once again: this is a dark story, slavery, dubcon, noncon. There are slaves, Greg House is one of them, if you want to know how it got this way read "Seven Stages", the ongoing story is Collar Redux now in 2nd season. Enjoy, if that's the word, the ongoing story of Doctor House's first sixteen days at PPTH. Tailkinker's written Greg's Story, we're posting alternate days._

**Day Six (Wednesday)**

**_1. Overseer_**

Johnson had mentioned to Doris Foster in passing that Greg looked as if someone had been slapping him around: first thing Wednesday morning, when Doris ordered Greg to her office, the bruises were even more evident.

"Who hit you?"

Greg looked at her squarely. "No one," he said. He sounded quite sure of himself. "Ma'am, I have work to do for Doctor Cuddy, I need to go back to my office."

"You're bruised and you have a split lip," Doris said. Greg was on his knees, hands behind his back, in proper form, but he sounded much less docile than he had on Monday. Doris frowned, she didn't like sudden changes in behavior by slaves. (The tox screen run on Greg had been clean.) "Did you hit yourself?"

"No one hit me," Greg said again.

"Ten lashes for self-harm," Doris said. She stood up. "I don't tolerate slaves lying to me, Greg. If you hit yourself, I need to hand you over to the security staff: they'll inform your supervisor and administer a judicial whipping. If you're lying to me about hitting yourself, two strokes of the cane."

Greg knelt still, frozen. She walked round him to open the door to her office.

"I didn't hit myself," he said, his voice shaking.

"Good. Get up and bend over."

The two fresh marks now added to his backside, Doris put the cane back and told him to kneel. He hadn't been told to cover himself, and he didn't: he just dropped to his knees, looking much more shaken.

"Who hit you?"

"Someone came into the office..." he swallowed. "A maintenance worker. She was looking for something. I... I talked back to her... I'm sorry..."

"And she hit you," Doris said. She shouldn't have done that, of course: insolence should be reported, and hospital staff shouldn't hit slaves in the face, there was too much risk of hitting too hard. A slap on the back of the head, or on the slave's backside, that was all right, Doris allowed. "Do any of your teeth hurt? Did she hit you anywhere else?"

Greg shook his head, muttering a "no" to both questions.

"Then get back to work," Doris said.

He got up, pulled his pants up, and thanked her for caning him, head ducked. She'd have to write a memo to Doctor Cuddy about this. He might have talked back to the maintenance worker, but she might just have hit him rather than tell him to move out of her way: he was working all by himself in full view of the hall, she'd seen that for herself, and his supervisor was two floors away.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**2. Nurse**_

The free clinic was a great idea, Brenda Previn was prepared to defend it: she'd liked the idea of it when Doctor Cuddy first proposed it, and while it was often irritating how many of the patients were people who had trivial or embarrassing ailments (and probably insurance, they just didn't want to disclose what they had to their regular doctor), they were certainly taking a load off the ER.

What didn't work was trying to run it, even for a half a day Monday to Saturday, with a system of volunteers, mostly junior doctors on fellowships who thought they were doing their career some good by showing up for two hours each week when they didn't have something else they'd rather do.

Wednesday morning, Lisa Cuddy rang her and asked her to come over to her office for a lunch meeting: Brenda agreed with enthusiasm and suggested that new coffee place with the cupcakes, five minutes away.

"Sorry - it'll have to be in my office," Lisa said. "I'll order in sandwiches."

Lisa wasn't alone in her office when Brenda got there: she was meeting with a doctor, one Brenda hadn't seen before. He was tall, perched uncomfortably on the edge of his seat, wearing a roll-top under his white labcoat. He had a set of nasty bruises round his mouth. He remained seated, glancing at Lisa.

"Brenda, I'd like you to meet the doctor who'll be working in the free clinic with you," Lisa said. "Doctor Greg House."

Brenda nodded, walking into the room and holding out her hand. "Pleased to meet you, Doctor House," she said.

The doctor glanced at Lisa again, got a nod, held out his hand, and shook hers: he looked awkward and - oddly frightened? - He hadn't said a word.

"Greg, why don't you tell Brenda your qualifications?"

"I have a double speciality, Board-certified, in nephrology and infectious diseases," Doctor House said. "Doctor Cuddy bought me to run the Diagnostics department." He glanced at Lisa again, and looked really scared - and suddenly Brenda caught the odd phrasing in what he'd said.

"Lisa, you _bought_ him?" This was the "personal slave" that there'd been rumors about?

"Take off your labcoat and roll-top, Greg," Lisa said.

He did so, quickly, folding both, head ducked. He was wearing a clean white t-shirt and black jeans, and a heavy dark metal collar round his neck.

"Put those down and fetch the other chair," Lisa told him. "Go get the bag lunch from my secretary."

"What is this?" Brenda asked. Lisa Cuddy wasn't a practical joker, but Brenda truly didn't appreciate being fooled like that, even for a good reason.

"Not quite three months ago, Doctor Gregory House was enslaved for debt," Lisa told her. "He really does have two Board-certified specialities, and more than that - I remember him from medical school in Michigan: he had a knack for _seeing_ what was wrong with a patient. PPTH has bought him, and we're in process to re-activate his medical license. From Monday after next, he'll be working four hours a day in the free clinic, under your supervision. He's also in the process of setting up a Diagnostics department, which will take on the patients that other doctors can't figure out."

"This isn't going to work," Brenda said.

"Why shouldn't it?"

"He's a slave!"

"When you first saw him, did you think he was a slave?"

"No, I assumed he was a new doctor. You had him dressed up like one."

"He'll be wearing rolltops to hide his collar. He'll be wearing a labcoat. The patients will react to him like a doctor, which he _is_, and I need the staff in the clinic to treat him like a doctor in front of the patients. Will you help?"

The door opened and Greg came back into the room, carrying a brown bag. Lisa pointed to the third chair. "Sit down there, Greg." She looked at Brenda.

Brenda stared at the slave. She didn't have much to do with slaves in the ordinary way - she knew they did the cleaning at PPTH, sometimes you'd see one scuttling out of the way or ducked down on their knees. There were a handful working in clerical jobs and doing messenger work and she'd seen two or three in the labs. They didn't talk unless they were spoken to, ever. Sometimes you saw them tethered to one of the walls. Occasionally a patient would come in who had a personal slave, but now Brenda didn't work on the wards she didn't have to deal with them.

"Put your roll-top back on, Greg," she told him. It might be easier if she couldn't see his collar.

He obeyed her, after a glance at Lisa, and sat down in the chair. He looked very awkward and unsure of himself. Lisa unpacked lunch - sandwiches, soft drinks, two cupcakes - and picked up one of the sandwiches, salad on wholewheat bread. "Greg."

He stood up: she handed him the sandwich. "We're going to have lunch. You can eat too. Sit down."

He sat, holding the sandwich. He looked so frankly uncomfortable that Brenda said, meaning to be sympathetic, "Shouldn't he be kneeling?"

"He's a slave," Lisa said. "He should be doing exactly what I tell him to do. We can't have him dropping to his knees in an exam room, or referring to himself as 'this slave' when he asks a patient his symptoms. He even let some maintenance worker slap him around yesterday, in the Diagnostics office. Brenda, supposing Doctor House had come in for a job interview, to be the free clinic's main doctor, what sort of questions would you ask him?"

Brenda thought about it. She took a couple of bites of her sandwich, watching the slave. Collar hidden, sitting on a chair, hardly venturing to eat the sandwich he held, he could have been a very shy and awkward man who'd recently got himself into a fight. But he really was chattel. He was the property of the hospital, the same as any other slave, and he shouldn't be doing this. "I'd ask why he wanted to work a free clinic when he's so highly qualified, but I suppose he'd say because that's what his owner wants him to do."

"Pretend he's not a slave. What would you ask him?"

"I'd ask him about his background, his experience... but Lisa, he _is_ a slave. That's his background. That's the only experience that counts. I suppose we can use him to treat slaves, he can probably treat them just fine. But patients have to have confidence in their doctor, they have to believe their doctor knows what he's talking about. How can anyone have any confidence in someone who lost control of their life completely and got collared?"

Lisa looked, for a moment, so completely thrown Brenda almost wished she hadn't said it. Brenda glanced at the slave again, the sandwich still in his hand, watching both of them. Listening to both of them.

Plain speaking between themselves was how she and Lisa had stayed friends, even when Lisa got a job at PPTH as a beancounter instead of a doctor, but slaves had ears; it was time to get that one out of this office.

Lisa was rustling in her desk for some papers. Probably her plans for this Diagnostics department. The slave should definitely go. Brenda jerked her hand at the door. "You. Get out."

Greg got up. He put the sandwich down on the chair he had been sitting on and clasped his hands behind his back, he looked as if he was about to drop to his knees, but he said something in a stammer that was nearly incoherent, of which Brenda caught only "Diabetes".

"What?"

"Mr Smith has type two diabetes," Greg said, much more clearly. "You have toothache."

Brenda had been conscious of a slight ache in her lower left jaw for some time, and had been making up her mind to go see a dentist. She stared at the slave in disbelief. "Who told you?" she said, just as Lisa said "Who the hell is Mr Smith?"

"The supervisor," Greg said. He swallowed, a big nervous gulp. "When I clean bathrooms. He's the supervisor. He has type two diabetes. One of your teeth hurts on the left side of your mouth, you were favoring the right side when you chew. I can do what Doctor Cuddy wants."

Lisa and Brenda stared at each other. Brenda pointed at the door. "You," she said to Greg, again. "Get out."

"Go back to the Diagnostics office and get back to work," Lisa said. "Don't leave the office, not for any reason. Don't speak to anyone."

Once the door closed behind Greg, Brenda said "I do have toothache. On the left side. I mentioned to you last week I needed to go see a dentist, did you tell him?"

"No, of course not," Lisa said. "I barely remember - " She shook her head. "This is what I meant to show you." It was a typescript: "Form and Function of the PPTH Diagnostics Department".

"Who wrote it?"

"He did," Lisa said. She looked across the desk at Brenda. "He can function as a doctor," she said, sounding too sure of herself to be quite convincing to Brenda. "He's damned good, he always was. Will you help?"

"I'll think about it," Brenda said.

She did think about it. And she went looking for "Mr Smith", and found him at his desk, a big man in his early fifties. She introduced herself to him as Brenda Previn, from the free clinic, and asked if they could have a quiet word.

He didn't have diabetes. None of his parents or grandparents had diabetes, as far as he knew.

"Would you agree to get tested?" Brenda asked him.

"Do you think I might have?" he asked, predictably nervous.

"I don't know," Brenda said honestly. "But if you come to the clinic, it won't cost you anything to get tested. Do your cuts tend to take a long time healing?"

"Yeah...?"

"Are you thirsty a lot?"

"Yeah. I thought it was the air conditioning."

"It probably is. But it couldn't hurt to get tested. You could come down to the clinic this afternoon, get the results tomorrow." Brenda could take a blood draw.

And when it turned out he did have diabetes, somehow, she wasn't surprised. "Do you remember a new slave, cleaning bathrooms, quite tall?"

"Sure. Not a bad worker." Smith said. He was still looking at the result, and shaking his head. "Diabetes. Jesus. What do I do now?"

"I've got a couple of leaflets here for you," Brenda said. She talked with him for a little while about type two diabetes, and gave him a letter for his doctor. When he seemed a bit more secure about his situation, she asked again about the slave "Did you talk to him? Did he ask you any questions?"

Smith shook his head. "I only had him two mornings, Mrs Foster usually sticks the new guys into Sanitation before they get assigned to their permanent jobs. Why do you want to know?"

"He's a doctor," Brenda said. "He diagnosed you."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**3. Supervisor**_

Greg had shown up at Doctor Cuddy's office promptly at eight. He presented her with his notebook, and she leafed through it, eyeing him. He was bruised all around his mouth. And he looked unshaven.

"Do you have an appointment with the groomer today?"

He didn't. Well, the stubble might hide the bruising a little. Cuddy had already delayed the planned meeting with Nurse Previn two more days to allow Greg's hair to grow to a length that looked almost normal, and she couldn't afford any more delays.

"Have you been getting into a fight?" Cuddy asked.

Greg shook his head.

The work in the notebook this morning was excellent. Cuddy grinned briefly, reading a section that sounded classic Greg House, headed "Everybody lies". She didn't have time to look through it in detail, but there was a clear, substantive difference between this and his failure of yesterday. "Keep up your work to this standard from now on," she told him. "I want you here for a lunchtime meeting with the nurse who runs the free clinic. Be here at quarter to one. Get back to the Diagnostics office and keep working on this, but I want you to deliver this notebook to my secretary to have it typed up at the end of the morning, then get downstairs and change into a rolltop to cover your collar, and one of your labcoats. If anyone queries you about this, tell them to call my office. Don't be late. And don't get into any more fights."

The memo that arrived at her desk from Doris Foster, with the inter-departmental mail at half past ten, explained Greg's bruises and annoyed Cuddy. Apparently a maintenance worker had entered the Diagnostics office and Greg had "talked back" to her, so she'd hit him. Remembering the blistering sarcasms Greg House could deliver when he was interrupted at work, and from the evidence of the notebook he'd clearly been hard at work yesterday, Cuddy was caught between annoyance at Greg and at the maintenance worker - she could presumably have searched the office without interrupting Greg's work, but Greg should have known better than to use his sarcasm on a free woman.

What really annoyed her was that Foster evidently found Cuddy's arrangements to blame. It was hardly her fault that Greg had a smart mouth or that some maintenance worker had clumsily interrupted him.

Greg turned up again reasonably promptly at ten to one - Cuddy had arranged to have Brenda Previn meet her for lunch at one, and had allowed extra time to make sure Greg looked clean and tidy. Apart from the unshaven chin and the bruising, he looked fine dressed in the rolltop that Mrs Foster had bought for him, a standard labcoat, and the black jeans and black shoes Cuddy had bought: if you didn't know, Cuddy was pretty sure that no one could tell he was a slave. Cuddy had him sit down on the visitor's chair in her office, despite his evident discomfort, and told him that he was to introduce himself to Nurse Previn as "Doctor Greg House", and respond to her questions without identifying himself as a slave. "

"You'll need to act like a doctor when you're treating patients in the clinic," she told him firmly. "_Politely_," she added, "but not like a slave. Just act like a reasonable human being."

The meeting with Brenda did not go well. After Brenda had ordered Greg out of the room - Cuddy hoped he'd remember to pick up his notebook from her secretary on the way down to the office - Brenda sat down in the visitor's chair and looked at her with dismay and sympathy.

"How much did you pay for him?"

"The hospital bought him. He cost... Well, a lot. Depreciated over twenty years, though, he's a bargain - he really is a brilliant doctor."

"Lisa, he's a _slave_," Brenda said. "Have you ever heard a slave question a free person? How's he even going to ask patients what their symptoms are, if he can't speak to them without stammering and looking like he wants to fall to his knees?"

"He can when he's working," Cuddy said. "I got him to write a paper on Diagnostics as a speciality - he'll have it done by Friday as a first draft - and when a maintenance worker came into his office yesterday, he told her off for interrupting him." She half-laughed.

"Did he tell you that?" Brenda sounded disturbed.

"No. Doris Foster sent me a memo about it. She's the overseer - " Cuddy found the memo and handed it to Brenda.

"I don't believe it," Brenda said. She shook her head. "That slave couldn't talk back to anyone. Somebody's lying."

Cuddy had other work to do, but she found it hard to keep her mind on it. Her secretary delivered the first pages of the Diagnostics paper by half past three, and Cuddy only then remembered she'd meant to speak to Greg about the insta-diagnosis he'd interrupted their lunch meeting with. That kind of talk - even if he happened to be right about Brenda's toothache - wouldn't go down well with the Board, and Greg had to be warned off it.

She could see that Brenda wanted to suggest she admit she'd made a mistake, and sell Greg on: though the Center would take a slave back, Cuddy supposed, if the buyer discovered within a reasonable period of time that the slave simply wasn't suitable for what he'd been bought for. Probably an arrangement could be made with the New Jersey Center instead of the Pennsylvania Center. Cuddy read through the paper. Still. This _was_ good.

Greg was kneeling in front of a chair in the Diagnostics office, working at his notebook, using it as a desk. The door was open. Cuddy stood watching him from the hall for a minute or two: he looked focussed, intent, despite his odd position.

She walked into the room and closed the door, and Greg flinched - actually, more than flinched. He cringed back against the wall, putting the notebook behind him, before he seemed to realise who it was.

"Doctor Cuddy," he said, stammering. He got to his feet, standing with his shoulders hunched and his hands behind his back.

"Sit down, Greg."

Greg sat down, on the floor. Cuddy shook her head. "Sit down on the chair."

Greg got to his feet quickly, but when he sat down, he did it very gingerly. Cuddy frowned at him.

"What exactly happened to your face?"

"I answered back, ma'am," Greg said. He swallowed. "I'm sorry, ma'am."

"Tell me what you said," Cuddy said, making her voice stern. "Exactly what you said. Lies may work on Mrs Foster, but they won't work on me."

"I told her I was supposed to be working..." Greg said. He swallowed again, as if he wanted to be sick. "I told her she needed to leave because I was working here. I told her you said she needed to leave..."

"Because a maintenance worker was looking for something?" Cuddy was annoyed. "And that was when she hit you."

"Yes, ma'am." Greg swallowed again. "Ma'am... she wasn't looking for anything."

"Then what was she doing in here?" Cuddy looked around the room again, there was nothing visibly broken. It had been pouring with rain yesterday. She remembered the faint whiff of cigarette smoke. "She came in here to use this as a smoking room," Cuddy said.

Greg shifted in his chair: it looked absurdly as if a cringe had turned into a wince of pain. Cuddy frowned at him again.

"Get up," she said on a trace of suspicion. "Drop your jeans and turn round."

Eight cane marks had heavily bruised Greg's backside. Cuddy was relieved Greg couldn't see her face. Obviously slaves had to be disciplined... but this was as bizarre a shock in its way as seeing Greg House shaved bald and begging permission for a bathroom break. She made herself impassive before she said, sternly, "Pull up your jeans. You can kneel. What were you punished for?"

The catalogue seemed banal in its triviality: Greg had missed exercise, missed Sunday morning cleaning, locked himself in this office, had at first told Mrs Foster that "no one" had hit him. Well, Cuddy could understand the motivation of the last - almost. Still: a brilliant doctor was being caned by his overseer, for absurdly trivial offenses.

Cuddy meant to deal with this, but she glanced at the alarm clock and saw it was now after four. "Tell the exercise supervisor you were working late on my authority," she said briskly. "He should call me if there's an issue with this. Tell him I'm sorry you're late, and ask him to let you do your outdoor exercise till five. Run along. I'll see you tomorrow sharp at eight."

"Ma'am, permission..."

"No, you may not miss your exercise," Cuddy interrupted.

Greg shook his head. "Please - I'd like to keep working at this."

"You've got your schedule for now," Cuddy said. "You'll just have to follow it." She wasn't pleased by his sulky look, but it was good to know Greg wasn't slacking off any more.

Brenda called her office just before five. "Lisa? I tracked down 'Mr Smith'."

"Oh, damn," Cuddy said. "I meant to tell him not to come out with that kind of insta-diagnosis. It's not going to impress anyone."

"Lisa, I think he does have type two diabetes."

"What?"

"I talked to him, asked him about the usual symptoms, did a blood draw. I'll get the results back tomorrow. But I won't be surprised if he _is_ diabetic. And if he is, I'm with you - that slave is too good to waste cleaning bathrooms." Brenda paused. "Also, I've made that dentist appointment."

**_tbc_**

_If you liked this, read Tailkinker's "Greg's Story" Wednesday tomorrow. (Also, if you like, leave a review, because Reviews Are Love. And cupcakes!)_


	8. Day 7

_Alternate universe America, there are slaves, House is just one of them. Tailkinker and I wrote 16Days in alternate Days, I'd send a day from several other points of view and get feedback and then Greg's Day and I'd send feedback and so on and this worked! And then Thursday (day 7) rolled up and the Peach walked in and told me all about it and I realised I didn't really have anything else - Cuddy was busy elsewhere (she did have other things to do besides supervise Greg) and so was Mrs Foster and Greg spent all day working quietly in his office. So this is one short chapter all about one slave who's been owned by PPTH even before Mrs Foster started working there. Hey, the world doesn't revolve round Greg House, you know._

**Day Seven (Thursday)**

**_The Peach_**

Upstairs, they called her Polly, and she worked in the infectious diseases laboratory. She'd had a college qualification when she was enslaved, twenty-three years ago, and she was comfortable enough with what she did: from five to seven (earlier or later, if Mrs Foster changed her between dorms) she cleaned the floors and other surfaces in the hospital laboratories. From seven to half past seven, she cleaned out the lounge and set out the mugs and made the first jug of coffee.

First meal of the day for the dorm she slept in was half past seven till eight. Somehow she was never hungry until she looked at the clock, and then suddenly she'd be so hungry it was difficult to walk, not too fast, to the stairs, and run down to the basement. (You could run on the stairs, if free people weren't using the stairway as a short cut. But at that time in the morning, most of them took the elevator.) At five to eight she went back up the stairs, comfortably full of hot cereal and bread (dried fruit in the cereal this morning) and as she passed the second floor, the tall slave who was said to be Doctor Cuddy's favorite, slipped through the door and started climbing the stairs: he went up fast, almost at a run, carrying a notebook. Doctor Cuddy's office was on the fourth floor: looked like he was heading there.

From eight to six, Polly worked as a technician, more or less - a piece of flexible, functional hospital equipment that could run tests, clean spills, take messages, and when she was younger, give blow-jobs in coffee breaks. She didn't do much filing, because there were six slaves in the hospital who did nothing but filing. Her exercise hour was from half past ten to half past eleven, and today it wasn't raining: it was almost pleasant being outdoors. Mr Johnson liked screwing men, men at least twenty years younger than him, pretty much exclusively, but he enjoyed making all the slaves get sweaty and dirty, and he liked using the cane on any excuse: it was safer, even if you were a woman and nearly fifty, not to stand out from the other slaves in any way.

One of the other slaves told her on the way back to work, Mr Johnson liked the new slave, too: he'd been screwing the new guy pretty much whenever he could get him. Mr Johnson liked to fuck a slave's ass at the end of the day (though if he picked on a woman, he'd usually take a blow-job). He wasn't a mean fuck, the slaves who'd been picked on said. This wasn't news, Mr Johnson always fucked the new male slaves if they were the right age for him and pretty athletic (he'd ignored poor Danny), but it was rich gossip to wonder what would happen when Doctor Cuddy found out who was screwing her favorite.

At six, or whenever the last free technican left the labs, she was free to go downstairs again and became the Peach, who ran their own private basement library. Slaves didn't own anything. But it was still, kind of, her library.

Tonight most of the technicians were going to a _Star Trek_ marathon at the local cinema, so she was able to go before six: the labs and the lounge were empty. Polly didn't know anything about _Star Trek_, she'd been a slave before the first episode was broadcast. The Peach knew it used to be a sci-fi TV series and now there was a movie series and spin-off novels. Sometimes there were magazine articles about it, and the library had collected a handful of books that listed other books.

She wouldn't get to eat now for two hours, but Judy Kelly had left a pot of fruit yogurt in the fridge, and Polly knew she could claim tomorrow morning (if Miss Kelly asked her) that she'd had to throw it out when she cleaned because it was outdated. There was a free local newspaper in the lounge, not worth anything to the library because there were too many copies left over the hospital and it was mostly advertising. But she sat down in the lounge and ate the yogurt, one slow appreciative spoonful at a time, and finished the last of the coffee in the pot, and read an article about local transport issues, consuming it as slowly and appreciatively as the yogurt.

The library had begun because the Peach wanted to be able to read. Slaves weren't allowed to read except for their work.

The new slave was in the same dorm as Jon, so he must finish work at five and eat at six: but when she left the lounge to go leisurely downstairs at nearly her usual time, she was passing the second floor just a few minutes before six and he headed out and down the stairs, evidently trying to get to the canteen before he was late.

"They don't worry if you're a few minutes late in the evenings," the Peach called after him quietly. She didn't know if he'd hear, but he stopped and looked back up at her.

"What?"

The Peach caught up with him. She wasn't in a hurry. "In your dorm, if you're only a few minutes late for your second meal, they just assume your supervisor kept you. That's Doctor Cuddy, isn't it?"

The Peach had heard via Mace, who was one of Kev's friends and liked detective stories, that the new guy was crazy stupid - he'd smuggled a notebook into the dorm, strictly forbidden, and then turned himself and the notebook over to the security guards, rather than trade some paper out of the notebook with Kev's lot. New slaves didn't get told about the library till it was sure they were going to stay and they could be trusted, and a favorite wasn't going to be trusted for quite a while.

The new guy gave her a suspicious, frowning look. He didn't look crazy or stupid. "What about it?"

"Well, she might easily have kept you late at work, mightn't she?" The Peach was hinting: Doctor Cuddy hadn't (yet) done anything (quite) as open as Mr Johnson screwing the new guy.

"I saw Doctor Cuddy this morning at eight," the new guy said, crisply. "I don't see her again till tomorrow morning." He glanced at her again, and speeded up till he was once again running down the stairs and out of sight.

The Peach was never sure if Mrs Foster knew the library existed, or guessed it did: Mrs Foster had worked in the hospital almost as long as she had, and the Peach had found that since Mrs Foster had become the senior Overseer, things tended to run more smoothly: food was good and plentiful, even slaves being punished weren't left to go hungry, Mrs Foster's rules for the canteen and dorms were reasonably easy to keep, and she "didn't care" for brutality - security guards or staff who hit slaves to hurt them, or tried nastier tricks, or were rough with slaves they used for sex, found Mrs Foster on their case. Dorms were locked down with lights out, no admission except for emergencies: slaves here got their eight hours rest. Slaves didn't get anything except what they needed, but they did get that, and Peach knew that this was something to be grateful for.

Nobody thought slaves needed to read, not the way the Peach wanted to read. She didn't tie her library into any of the other rackets, she could always get a bit of extra food from where she worked and she had good official-issue clothes to wear and she didn't care for getting drunk: she let people who brought her books and magazines, and newspapers that weren't just the Princeton-Plains Gazette, earn credits against getting to borrow from her supply of reading. The other story about the new guy was that Doctor Cuddy liked him so much he didn't really even have a job: he just sat in one of the disused offices on the second floor and read all the time. The Peach thought there must be more to it than that, but she was a bit envious just the same: even though anyone could tell the new guy, slaves who just got to be enjoyed and didn't have to work, were in for a bad time when their owner's enjoyment ran out and they looked at their slave and wondered what they'd fetch at auction. Maybe the new guy would get to work with access to books, whenever he did real work: the Peach would talk to him about her library then.

Everything Mrs Foster did was meant to get a slave's full labor out of them. Damage a slave's ability to work, and Mrs Foster would get angry as hell. Mrs Foster had even got Doctor Gray to stop screwing Polly after she started crying in the lab and wept as the security guards carried her down to the basement and was still weeping hysterically as Mrs Foster caned her in her office. Doctor Gray was the department head, and he hadn't been nice and he hadn't been clean, and he hadn't been happy about being told to leave her alone - but he'd stopped when Mrs Foster told him he had to. And if Doctor Cuddy were spoiling a slave for his work, the Peach would bet at least three of her best books that Mrs Foster would put a stop to it.

_tbc.. later!_

_Because this is a short chapter Tailkinker is posting Greg's Day later today, and I'll post Day 8 tomorrow. _


	9. Day 8

_This is the first fifteen days of Greg House as the property of PPTH. There are slaves in this universe, Greg's one of them, he got that way in the "Seven Stages" story, the story continues in Collar Redux._

**Day Eight (Friday)**

_**1. Nurse**_

Lisa had let Brenda know that the Diagnostics office finally had office furniture including a phone: so Brenda called the number. At first no one answered: the call went directly to voicemail. Brenda had a little picture in her head of the slave Greg sitting right next to the phone staring at it worrying that he had no orders to answer it. This was never going to work.

Well, it had to. She dialled again, punching the buttons with exasperation. This time the phone was answered on the second ring: a voice Brenda recognized said uncertainly, "Hello. D - Diagnostics department."

"Greg, this is Brenda Previn. What are you working on right now?"

"I have a paper to finish off for Doctor Cuddy, ma'am," Greg said. "Doctor Cuddy wants me to hand it to her secretary for typing by ten."

It was just after nine. "Are you going to be able to do that?" Brenda asked.

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said. He sounded nervous.

"When you've finished the paper and handed it over for typing, I want you to go get that rolltop and white coat you were wearing on Wednesday. Don't put them on. Just take them to the Diagnostics office. I'll call you when I want you to wear them. Don't worry, I'll sort this out with Doctor Cuddy."

She rang Lisa and told her what she had planned: Lisa was enthusiastic and helpful. "I planned to have him study for his medical license test - they're scheduling a written test and an oral test, damn them - but this is better."

"He can be studying," Brenda said. "Besides, with the test - he'll pass the written or he's less use than I thought. You need to get him able to pass the oral. This'll help."

There would be four doctors working in the clinic tomorrow, and five nurses, as well as Brenda herself. The only time they could all manage it was half past two - and one of the fellowship doctors, Doctor Bergeron, was adamant he could spare only ten minutes for this meeting. "Fine," Brenda said. "Meet by the elevators, first floor. Don't be late."

"I'm taking you to meet someone who'll be working in the clinic regularly with me from Monday next," Brenda told them when they were all in the elevator. "He'll be working in the clinic tomorrow, all day. The reason I'm taking you to see him ahead of time is that there's something pretty unexpected about his appearance."

"We're professionals," Doctor Bergeron said dryly. "I think we could cope."

"Thank you all for taking the time to be here," Brenda said, just as dryly. Glynne Perry, one of the nurses, caught her eye and grinned.

The door had "Diagnostics Department" on it, and it stood open. The room looked small with two desks crammed into it and a filing cabinet: Greg sat at one of the desks, with a pile of books and a notebook in front of him. He looked up as they came in. His chair slid back, against the wall, though his face looked expressionless.

"Close the door," she told Bergeron, who was the nearest person to it, and nodded to Greg.

"Please stand up, Doctor House."

Greg stood up at once. His hands went behind his back, but he didn't duck his head; he was staring from face to face, looking really worried now.

"Take the labcoat and the rolltop off," Brenda said.

Greg obeyed her instantly. There was a slight buzz of reaction as the labcoat came off: when he pulled the rolltop off the whispers became a sudden "What is this?" from several of them.

"This is Greg," Brenda said. "He was bought to run the Diagnostics department in this hospital. Copies of the papers he's been writing on Diagnostics as a speciality will shortly be available, if you want to read them. He was a qualified doctor before his license was revoked as a chattel, but the hospital is applying to have his license reactivated, and he will be able to treat patients in the free clinic, where he will be working four hours a day, every day, from Monday next."

The shout of voices from nine outraged doctors and nurses arguing that this was impossible might have gone on for longer, if there were fewer of them, but Brenda had got all of them at once figuring that they would quiet down faster when they realized they couldn't get answers while they were all yammering.

When Brenda had called Greg to tell him to put his rolltop and labcoat on, she'd forbidden him in the strongest terms possible to kneel or to call the assembled doctors and nurses "sir" or "ma'am". He was still standing, but he was shaking, really literally trembling all over: he looked like he wanted not so much to kneel as fall flat on his face.

"Sit down, Greg," Brenda ordered him quietly. Once he was sitting in the chair again, she raised her voice, "We don't have much time," she pointed out very loudly, "so can I suggest you all quiet down."

They did, more or less, though small indignant protests could still be heard.

"If you object to working with a slave, you don't have to," Brenda said. "Everyone who works in the free clinic is a volunteer, except for me. And Greg," she added, dryly, getting a laugh that reduced a lot of tension. She waited it out, and went on, "Tomorrow, Greg isn't going to be doing anything more than any clerical worker would do. He doesn't have a license and he isn't going to be seeing any patients. You don't have to call him 'Doctor House'."

"Like that's going to happen," Doctor Bergeron said.

"But when he's treating patients, you _will_ have to call him 'Doctor House' in front of the patients. In front of any of the patients, not just those he happens to be seeing. He will be wearing a rolltop that hides his collar and a white labcoat tomorrow and every day he works in the clinic. We don't want people outside the hospital knowing that a slave is working as a doctor: it's not illegal, it's not in any way against the law or against medical ethics or the regulations of the New Jersey medical licensing board, but from your own reaction you know that it could discourage people from coming into the free clinic, and _I will not tolerate that_."

Everyone in the room went quiet. Brenda nodded.

"I've asked Doctor Cuddy to see you all to talk to you about not gossiping about hospital practice or use of hospital equipment - and Greg is a very valuable item of hospital equipment. She's got a lot of confidence in you as medical professionals. If _I_ hear that any of you have been running your mouths off about him outside this hospital, or around patients, you're all going to regret it." She pointedly caught each person's eyes.

"All right, you're busy people, you can go now," Brenda released them. "Make arrangements to go have a quick word with Doctor Cuddy in her office before the end of the day. I'll see you all tomorrow."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**2. Supervisor**_

On Friday afternoon, Doctor Cuddy talked to the nurses who would be working in the clinic on Saturday as a group - they were none of them students, they all took seriously what Brenda told them about not discouraging people from attending the free clinic. The interns and fellowship doctors came in one by one over Friday afternoon, each with different reactions to working with a slave (angry, outraged, disbelieving, amused). Cuddy supposed she might have felt similarly, except Greg was working _for_her, and except... he's Greg House.

Yes, he was the slave who knelt by her office door first thing in the morning, desperate for her approval of the work he did yesterday. But he had also written a paper which was brilliant - Cuddy felt almost as proud of it as if it were her own work. Greg House was said to be a medical genius: and thanks to her, PPTH would own that genius.

She'd had her secretary type up two copies. The second copy was with Greg for him to finish proofreading by four, and her secretary had promised if the slave got it back to her by then she would have it retyped and copied for circulation to the Board members by the end of the day. On Monday morning, maybe Sunday if any of them came in to collect their interdepartmental mail at the weekend, the Board would be reading Greg's outline of the PPTH Diagnostics department, his paper on Diagnostics as a speciality, and her own resume of his career and qualifications to date.

Did Greg need to know the New Jersey medical licensing board wanted to test him on Wednesday? Cuddy considered, tapping the letter from them. No: she thought Brenda was right. Greg would ace the written test, and for the oral test, he just needed the confidence to answer a free person's questions. Clerical work in the clinic would give him the opportunity to do that. She'd get cuffs to secure him with rather than shackles, she hadn't cared for his hobbling along beside her when they went to buy clothes. Greg could simply be told on Tuesday that tomorrow he was to report to her office for nine instead of eight: the tests are due to start at ten for the written test (two papers, break for lunch) and then the oral exam would take place from two to four. If they finished sharp at four, she might even be able to get Greg back to the hospital for the last half hour of his exercise session.

Just before four, her secretary knocked and came in. "Doctor Cuddy, I need to have the slave's time for an hour while I retype. Some of his notes aren't very clear."

"Well?" Cuddy glanced up.

"The slave says he needs your permission to stay," the secretary said. She looked annoyed. Cuddy shared her with five other administrators, and had already decided that when she moved up, she wouldn't take this secretary with her: she's always annoyed about something.

"Fine," Cuddy said. "Whatever you need to have that typed up and copied on time."

"Thank you, Doctor Cuddy," the secretary said, and closed the door again.

It was only when the secretary came in to report the copies made - at quarter of five, just in time for the very last internal-mail collection on Friday - that it occurred to Cuddy _why_Greg had asked the secretary to get Doctor Cuddy's permission to stay: he'd probably missed his official exercise session because he was "finishing proofreading for Doctor Cuddy", and now he'd missed his chance to catch up, because "Doctor Cuddy said I had to stay". She'd be getting yet another memo from Mrs Foster on Monday.

She thanked the secretary and told her to send Greg in at five to five.

What the law actually said, she had discovered when she looked it up, was that owners could only keep slaves indoors all the daylight hours if this was essential to the labor the slave provided - and that they must then provide the slaves with the necessary Vitamin D supplements, etc, to keep the slaves in good health. PPTH had instituted the outdoor allotment of space for slaves to use for an hour each day many years ago, following the good practice of much larger organizations - there had probably been a sound argument made then that as a hospital they needed to keep even the slaves in good health. A few years ago a security guard, Matthew Johnson, who worked in slave handling, had needed to be assigned to light duties due to a back problem, and had taken on the job of keeping the slaves exercised when they were outdoors: there was no actual legal requirement for the _exercise_, the law's requirements would be satisfied by just herding the slaves out of doors and back in again. But apparently the slaves had in general been fitter and healthier since they were made to run or do calisthenics when they were out of doors.

She called Matthew Johnson, and left a message on his voicemail: Greg had missed exercise, she would see he got time outdoors, and she would have him disciplined for missing exercise, so no additional punishment would be required. He would attend exercise Saturday and Sunday. She called the head of the oncology department, whose office shared her balcony: he was gone already, which she'd guessed he would be.

When Greg came in, Cuddy went to the balcony doors and opened them. "Come on out here, Greg." He followed her out, blinking in the evening sun.

"Bring the chair over here, and sit down."

Once he was seated in the sunlight - the chair was a metal garden chair someone had dragged up here before Cuddy got this office, she seldom used the balcony - Cuddy told him, "I'm very pleased by your work this week. You turned in an excellent paper." The more Greg looked like Greg House, the stranger it felt to speak to him in these terms - today, hair grown out to a normal length, chin covered with stubble, if not for the collar round his neck he'd seem almost his old self. And the meek demeanor. Impossible to forget that. But she was his supervisor: he was a slave. He deserved her praise when he did work well.

"Thank you, ma'am," Greg said.

"Nurse Previn tells me you behaved quite well in front of the clinic staff when she introduced you to them. Keep that up. When you're working in the clinic, when you're functioning as a doctor, you should be able to ask and answer necessary medical questions."

"Thank you, ma'am," Greg said. There was that moment's pause, between when she finished and when Greg spoke, that was almost automaton-like.

"But today, you managed to avoid going to your exercise session - again. And I know what you meant to say to Mrs Foster when she asked you why you hadn't gone. 'Doctor Cuddy said I had to work', right?"

Greg's gaze became fixed, and a moment later, he ducked his head. "Sorry, ma'am," he said, almost voicelessly.

"I apologized to Matthew Johnson for your missing your exercise session today. You're out here on this balcony, not as a reward, but because we're required to let you be outdoors for an hour for your own good. You will go back in at five of six, and go directly to the canteen for your evening meal." Cuddy paused. "Here's your punishment - except for your work in the clinic on Saturday, when you'll be under Nurse Previn's supervision for whatever hours she's set for you, from now until you report to me at eight sharp on Monday morning, your schedule and duties are to be whatever the weekend's overseer sets for you. Did you lock the Diagnostics office when you left it?"

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said.

"Give me the key," Cuddy held her hand out and waited for him to drop it into her palm. There was nothing new she particularly wanted him to do, until the Board members started responding to the papers he had written: it would probably do Greg some good, after his week writing and studying, to take a couple of days doing purely physical work. And he'd have no excuse at all to miss his exercise sessions. "I'll let you have it back on Monday morning. Don't be late."

"Yes, ma'am." Greg looked shattered - thoroughly despondent. Evidently this was a good punishment for him, much more effective than caning.

"Work hard," Cuddy told him. "Don't let me hear any bad reports of your work, from Nurse Previn or from anyone else." She glanced at her watch. Not even quarter past five. She'd leave now and tell the guard at the security station to let Greg back out through her office in time for his evening meal. That should shake these unpleasant rumors that Greg was some kind of personal slave.

**_tbc_**

_Greg's in for a terrible, no-good, very bad weekend! But first, Tailkinker's written Greg's Story, posted tomorrow. R&R!_


	10. Day 9

_Don't like, don't read. __ It's fairly dark, there is abuse, discipline, dubcon, noncon, etc, etc, etc. __This story is set in a universe where there are slaves, and Greg House is one of them._ _The story starts where "Seven Stages" leaves off, and you probably need to read that first: _this is the story of Greg House's first sixteen days at PPTH in the Collar Redux universe._ _**  
><strong>

**Day Nine (Saturday)**

**_1. Jon_**

By Saturday both pairs of jeans were always pretty crunchy. There wasn't much to choose between them. Jon was dressed and leaving the dorm before he noticed that instead of dressing in his fancy clothes and heading upstairs as fast as he could, Greg was wearing work jeans and regular shoes and a standard-issue t-shirt - cleaner than Jon's because Greg had done no work all week, but just the same as all the other Sanitation slaves: and he was trudging at the same early-morning pace as everyone else to get the cleaning-kit.

The night-shift supervisor handing out the kits looked them over with tired eyes until he came to Greg. "Need a starter, big boy?"

Greg hesitated, he clearly had no idea what the right answer was. "Yes, sir...?"

"Take down your pants and bend over, big boy, I'll give you that starter right on your cheeks!" The supervisor laughed, and Jon, waiting in line behind Greg, made himself grin widely, as if the joke was funny. Greg should have laughed too, but he didn't: he was clutching his cleaning kit and standing still, not even moving on.

"Move it," the supervisor said, ending his laugh. "Take that sulky look off your face, big boy, you've got _work_ to do, and we'll see that you do it."

So Greg was on punishment detail this weekend. Jon wondered what he'd done: maybe nothing except not please Doctor Cuddy. Working with a slave who'd been assigned to Sanitation as a punishment could be pretty bad - petty inspections of every detail, fault-finding crackdowns, and a supervisor with a cane standing right there didn't make anyone's work day better. Greg had worked okay when he was assigned to Sanitation last week, though he'd done nothing but slack off since Doctor Cuddy let him, so maybe this would be okay. And maybe it was just that Doctor Cuddy wasn't in the hospital this weekend, and Greg was now to make up for wasted time.

Greg never talked much at mealtimes - he reacted to taunting, sometimes, but mostly he just sat there and shovelled his food in and went back upstairs or back to the dorm as soon as possible. Jon was talking quietly with Rob about the chances of rain later, but he saw Greg had left some of the vegetable mess in his bowl when he stood up, and Jon tapped his arm as a warning. "Clean your bowl," he said quietly.

Greg looked down at him. He was frowning.

"Clean your bowl," Jon said again, still quietly, and wiped his piece of bread round the bowl in illustration. Greg hadn't had to be told before, but there was no point his getting into trouble now.

"It's disgusting," Greg said, also quietly.

"Aw," Kev said, across the table. He'd promised to quit taunting Greg at mealtimes, Jon and the Peach had both asked him to, but that was an opening hard to resist. "Doctor Cuddy feeds you good, fancy boy." He opened his mouth and made an explicit gesture with his tongue, and several of the other slaves laughed.

Jon didn't. "Sit down and clean your bowl," Jon said, glancing at the supervisor, then at the door. Slaves sitting down and eating could talk and laugh, but Greg was on his feet, and they didn't like that in the canteen.

Greg got the message. He sat down. He ignored Kev and Jon and the others at the table. He'd finished his bread already, but he spooned the rest of the mess into his mouth, and got up again, just as if the signal had gone. He put his bowl and spoon into the used dish tray, and said to the canteen supervisor, "Please may I be excused, sir?"

"When you've licked your bowl clean, boy," the supervisor said, amused. "'Disgusting', is it? Good food, you should be grateful."

Jon couldn't see and didn't turn, but Kev told him afterwards that Greg licked the bowl as docile as a dog and handed it back for inspection: and Jon heard him say, monotone, "Thank you for the food, sir" and saw Greg waiting on all fours for the supervisor to release him when Jon got up as the signal went. A supervisor who didn't have a sense of humor might just have called security; this one, grinning, gave Greg a light kick in the butt and told him to get moving.

They were doing the fourth floor bathrooms when Jon saw Greg glance at a clock - it was half of seven - and turn away, holding his kit so it didn't rattle, heading down the hall to the stairs. Jon stared after him in surprise. Not his problem if Greg got into trouble for dodging work, but the speed Greg was going, someone was going to notice.

He didn't see Greg again for most of the day: but about half past two, as they were heading from the ground floor to the second floor, Jon realized through the steady tiredness that Greg was there again, dressed in his work clothes, holding his kit, cleaner than he would be than if he'd been at work for eight hours. Maybe he'd gone and hidden in the second-floor office where he sat and read on the days Doctor Cuddy was in: and maybe he'd got away with it. No one said anything to him as they jogged round the exercise field. At least it wasn't raining and Mr Flores liked women, so he'd probably had someone from one of the other dorms if he wanted a screw. No new cane marks on Greg's ass, just the fading ones from earlier in the week, so he hadn't been caught. Yet.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**2. Clinic Duty**_

Doctor Bergeron intended to pursue Emergency Medicine as a career: it had been clear to him since taking up the ER fellowship at PPTH, that Doctor Cuddy, though currently fairly junior in the hospital administration, was the kind of person who knew how to pull strings, who had connections and used them and understood about exchanging favors: he would not be surprised if she ended up moving on from this hospital to a much bigger hospital, with the kind of _ER_ he intended to be running when he was a consultant, but she would be useful and he wanted her to remember him. So he volunteered two hours at the free clinic, Doctor Cuddy's pet project, on his days off, consistently and with every appearance of enthusiasm.

Doctor Bergeron was on from ten till noon (which, unfortunately, meant that he would likely be there till one or later - Nurse Brenda closed the doors at noon, but expected all the patients already in the waiting room to be treated).

The slave was sitting behind the admissions desk, wearing a rolltop and a white labcoat, handing out the admissions forms to the patients as they came in, and doing filing. Doctor Bergeron had got in a few minutes early: he studied the slave, thinking that a keen observer would certainly see the line of the collar underneath the rolltop. The white coat was a further distraction, though - in a hospital, when you see a white coat, you think _doctor_. You certainly don't think _slave_.

"We should get him a stethoscope," he told Nurse Brenda, signing himself in on the clinic hours sheet. "And a pocket protector and maybe some free pens from a pharma company. It's all he needs to be really convincing."

Nurse Brenda glared at him: she didn't have a sense of humor at work, Bergeron had long since discovered.

"You have a patient waiting in exam room one since five of ten, Doctor," was all she said.

The rest of the morning went normally enough: the usual range of people who'd had unprotected sex and thought they might have an STD, people who had coughs and sniffles and wanted advice on the common cold, one girl with an impressive case of acne who thought she had skin cancer, and five anxious moms - Bergeron was thinking about going into pediatric emergency medicine, and he prided himself on dealing well with anxious parents as well as children. At noon, Bergeron popped his head out of the exam room to check the waiting area: it was full. They'd be here till one, then. The slave was coming back to the reception desk, he'd closed the doors.

"I want a cup of coffee." There was a small coffee maker in the tiny room behind the waiting area. Bergeron pointed, to be clear. He couldn't remember the slave's name, just that Nurse Brenda had said they were to call him "Doctor House" in front of the patients. Technically they _were_ in front of the patients - the waiting room collection could see them from here - and Bergeron grinned a little. "Get me one, 'Doctor House'. Cream, no sugar."

The slave said nothing. He was quick about fetching the coffee: Bergeron only realised as he handed it to him that the boy was about five inches taller than him, and no more than three or four years older. Bergeron nodded, as if that hadn't disconcerted him: the slave said, very quietly, "Doctor Bergeron, can I ask you about the third patient you saw, the twenty-seven year old woman with lung cancer?"

There hadn't been any patients with cancer this morning. Bergeron drank his coffee. He wondered what he was supposed to say in response to a comment like that: the slave stood still, staring down at him. Finally Bergeron nodded to Nurse Brenda, who moved over and said quietly, "Doctor, are you quite finished having your coffee break?"

"Not quite, thank you, Nurse," Doctor Bergeron said politely. "Your 'Doctor House' needs more work to do: he's inventing patients with cancer."

"The third patient Doctor Bergeron saw, ma'am," the slave said, still quietly. "Nurse Previn," he added, with a scared look. "I'm sorry."

"Go on, Greg," Nurse Brenda said.

"She'd recently lost a lot of weight and she had a persistent cough," the slave said. "A different kind of cough from the other patients who have seasonal bronchitis. I would have sent her for an x-ray. I don't think Doctor Bergeron did."

Nurse Brenda looked at him. Bergeron felt himself color up. He was annoyed. "I saw at least nine patients with coughs or sniffles this morning," he said. "Of course I didn't send them to X-ray!"

"Can you find her details?" Nurse Brenda asked. Greg produced an admissions form in a few minutes behind the desk.

"Are you taking this seriously?" Bergeron asked.

"Are you finished your coffee break, Doctor?" Nurse Brenda asked. "We have a full waiting room."

It took another hour to clear the waiting room. The other doctor who'd volunteered from ten to noon, Jenkins, had gone off about quarter past, claiming he had an "urgent appointment" apparently: with beer, Bergeron guessed. Jenkins had only recently finished his internship. He still acted a lot like a medical student.

One of the other nurses, Sanchez, who worked in pediatrics, had also stayed to the end: Bergeron offered to buy her lunch. By mutual agreement they headed for the staff canteen, and ate together. They'd discovered a mutual dislike for Doctor Jenkins some time ago, and this morning's failings took up most of their sandwiches.

"What do you think of that slave?" Sanchez said quietly, towards the end of the meal.

"'Doctor House'?" Bergeron said.

"Are _you_ going to call him that?"

Bergeron laughed. "I suppose it doesn't matter what a slave's called. So long as he does what he's told. He did something pretty out of key this morning, though." He told the story about the 'lung cancer', amused now it was over.

"He really is a qualified doctor," Sanchez said. "Doctor Cuddy spoke to us about him yesterday. She's got plans to start a Department of Diagnostics here, and he'll be working for it." She finished the last bite of her sandwich. "I felt sorry for him," she said. "Jenkins was dropping stuff on purpose and telling him to pick it up, and of course he had to, until Brenda stopped him."

Sanchez went back to work: Bergeron went into the ground floor men's room to take a leak. There was a cleaning slave wiping down the urinals, but he ducked his head and moved away, almost silently, and when Bergeron glanced round again, caught by a sudden thought, the slave was gone.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**3. Overseer**_

Doctor Cuddy's boy was on punishment detail this weekend, except for a stint he was doing in the clinic from eight till two, for which he was supposed to dress up in his fancy clothes and he was allowed to take a rolltop and white labcoat upstairs. Torres inspected him thoroughly before he allowed the boy to dress again in his nice clothes, after cleaning off under a cold shower.

"Report back to me when Nurse Previn says you can go," Torres told him. "If you're later than two, I'll be calling her to check up on you."

He was back at five of two, and Torres had him stripped, inspected, into his work clothes, and back upstairs with the cleaning kit by ten after. "Clean up the ground floor bathrooms by the canteen, they always need cleaning, before you go up to the second floor. I'll be looking for you. No slacking off."

Normally when a slave was put on punishment detail, it was for laziness or sometimes for pushing the boundaries - some supervisors thought slaves learned better from being put to hard work than from a quick caning. Certainly this slave didn't seem to be lazy or a boundary-pusher; he worked hard, he was quiet, he was docile. Torres checked with the exercise supervisor and found he'd shown up on time and not tried to slack off there, either.

The morning supervisor in the canteen had a story: Greg had got up and tried to walk out without finishing his food, making some comment about it. Rather than call security, which would have upset all the slaves who were eating quietly, the supervisor had made a joke of it: got him to lick his dish clean, made him wait on all fours like a dog for the signal to go. So maybe that was it: the slave was spoiled, getting used to being handfed treats.

When Greg came in for his evening meal, Torres called him aside into the overseer's office and told him to kneel. "Hear you don't think much of the food, boy."

Greg sounded and looked perfectly docile. "Sorry, sir."

"Slaves need to eat to do their work. We feed you well here."

"Yes, sir," Greg said.

Torres took a bowl out of his cupboard, and the bag of slave chow. He filled the bowl. "If you don't like the food, you can always get this instead."

Slaves hated being fed on chow, though Torres had tried a bit once and didn't think it was that bad: the worst part was it didn't really taste of anything. But it was guaranteed nourishing.

"Now you're going to eat this in ten minutes, by my clock," Torres said. "I'll tell you when to start. If you're not done in ten, you get one with the cane for every minute after that. If you're not happy with what you get in the canteen, you can always get fed in here, and get caned for dessert." He glanced at the clock, waiting for the second hand to reach the minute. "Okay, start now."

He didn't want the slave to choke: he sat and checked through some memos, keeping at least half an eye on the slave. After a reluctant start, Doctor Cuddy's boy went at it, and had finished the bowl before ten minutes were up. Torres had kept one piece of chow back in his hand, and when he saw the slave finish, he said "Here, Greg - " and held out his hand. "You're not done yet."

He made clear with a nod what he expected the slave to do: Greg crawled over on hands and knees and took the bit of chow with his lips. Torres uncapped a bottle of water and let Greg have some, then waited, as Greg licked his lips.

"Thank you, sir," Greg said finally.

Torres nodded. "All right, go shower and go to your dorm." The slaves had their own ways of spending these more or less free hours, before lights out, and Mrs Foster's ruling was that they didn't interfere so long as whatever the slaves did, didn't interfere with their work: but Greg should just lie down and think for a while about the difference between being a well-behaved slave and one in disgrace. "Don't even think about leaving the dorm tonight. Work hard tomorrow."

With a subdued glance, as if for permission, Greg got to his feet and left. Torres nodded, satisfied. He'd check the camera for that dorm to make sure Greg hadn't gone running off, but that looked like a lesson that had taken.

_tbc_

_As usual: Tailkinker's "Greg's Story" for Saturday will be posted tomorrow. _That's the parallel story told from Greg's POV over at Tailkinker's profile: we're posting alternate days._  
><em>


	11. Day 10

_The Sunday of Greg's terrible, no-good, very bad weekend. This is a sequel to "Seven Stages" and tells the story of Greg's first 16 days at PPTH as a slave. On his first Sunday at the hospital he got locked in a small room for hours with nothing to eat: will this Sunday be an improvement? Warnings? Do you need them at this point? Cuddy makes waffles.  
><em>

**Day Ten (Sunday)**

_**1. Kev**_

Kev had come to have a lot of respect for Jon, over the years. When Jon and the Peach both asked him to lay off Greg during Sunday morning cleaning, because they were going to straighten him out, Kev agreed.

He stayed out of Greg's way when they were cleaning up the dorm and the hall outside, even when Jon and Rob were lugging everyone's dirty clothes to the laundry, and later on when the supervisor picked Greg out to strip off and go under the counters and the stove in the kitchen to scrape up the dirt and mop the tiles, Kev didn't say a thing: Greg was a bigger guy than they usually chose to do that job, he had to squeeze to get in, but Greg was obviously still on punishment detail - the supervisor was carrying a cane - and it was one of the dirtiest jobs on Sunday morning. _The_ dirtiest job was going through the garbage chute with a mop, but Greg was too big to do that. Kev didn't - though he could have - spill his dirty water on Greg's clothes folded by the door.

A lot of the cleaning work on Sunday morning was pretty much unsupervised. Greg turned out to be not that bad a worker, and after a while the supervisor got bored with following him about with a cane and went out by the loading bay to have a cigarette. Jon hadn't spoken all morning, but he nodded to Kev and tapped Greg on the arm. "In here."

The Peach was already waiting in the grooming room: she'd wiped down the chairs and mopped the floor. Kev stepped out into the hall and began to make like he was cleaning the floor out here. He could still hear them talking, though at first Jon and the Peach were speaking in low voices.

"You don't get it," Greg said, quite loudly. He didn't sound aggressive about it: if anything he sounded scared. "You haven't got anything I want and I'm not going to lose this."

"No one wants you to lose out," the Peach said. She had a mild, strong voice. "It's not just about being willing to trade when you can. You got a lot of people's backs up. Maybe that's mostly not your fault, you're new. You can't help it if Doctor Cuddy favors you, but you don't need to act like having her as your supervisor makes you any better than anyone else."

"Won't last," Jon said. He spoke tersely. "Never does, I've seen it before. She hasn't even tagged you, but even if she did, no one tags a slave for ever. You could be here for a long time, for a lot longer than Doctor Cuddy's going to want you."

"It's not like that," Greg said.

"Everyone who gets tagged always says that," Jon said. "And she hasn't even tagged you."

There was a pause. Greg said, suddenly, "Why did you leave the door open?" Kev jerked himself back from the door as it was yanked wide. Greg stood in the doorway looking down at him.

"Right, this_ isn't_ all about the 'trading'", Greg said. He spoke very quietly most of the time. It startled Kev to hear him raise his voice. "I am a Board-qualified physician with a double speciality in nephrology and infectious diseases. From next Monday when my medical license is reactivated I'll be working in the free clinic as a doctor, and I'll be running the Diagnostics Department in this hospital. Doctor Cuddy didn't buy me because she 'wants' me, because she 'favors' me. I get treated differently from you because I _am_ different from you. I'm _better_." He kicked at Kev's bucket, and it went over, spilling dirty water over the hall. "Clean _that_ up," he said, and went.

Kev stood up. He stared at Jon and the Peach. "The guy's a wacko," he said.

The Peach opened one of the cupboards, pulled out a pack of paper towels, and threw it at Jon. She knelt down - she was rearranging the cupboard quickly so it wouln't look as if anything had been taken - and said, crossly, "Use those, fast - we have to get them into the garbage before they finish clean-up."

With two people mopping, the spill didn't take long. Jon stood up when they were done, with the bag of wet towels, and said, still mildly, "I'll get rid of these. Kev, you just remember - " He hesitated.

Kev looked back at him. He'd only once killed another slave, and that one had been crazy-dangerous, if Kev hadn't done for him he'd have done for a lot more people than just Kev. Jon had no reason to look at him like that. Mrs Foster would look into it if Greg looked like he had been beaten. So any bruises just wouldn't look like a beating. Lots of slaves fell down and hurt themselves when they were cleaning the basement. Or other times.

"Soften him up," the Peach said, with a shrug. She was kneeling to finish the cleanup of the room. "He'll listen better next time."

"Thanks for the towels," Kev said, and picked up his cleaning kit. He'd find a few of his friends, and they'd take Greg down. Not to hurt him. Not the first time. Just make it clear to him that he had to learn how to get along.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

**_2. Blood_**

Lauren stood watching, instructing the slave to squeeze and compress the little hand grip, as a pint of O-negative blood trickled into the collection bag. She was about to withdraw the needle and apply sticking-plaster when she heard the door open and felt all the slave's muscles freeze up.

"Calm down and relax, no one's going to hurt you," Lauren said, patting the slave's arm. She looked up then: June was dealing with it. Two guards were bringing a new slave in, cuffed and shackled, and from the look of things no one had bothered to tell him where he was going or even that he was definitely coming back. The phlebotomists took turns doing the slave collection on Sundays, but they were all in agreement that it was just _easier_ if the slaves were relaxed about it.

Sometimes this was difficult, when a slave was new and panicky. In general, the worst thing about collecting blood from slaves was the body odor. They were quite stinky and their clothes were dirty - there was a supply of antiseptic wipes on hand to clean a slave's hand and arm, because they quite often showed up just too grubby. Apparently they got fresh clothes on Sunday night: it was a shame they couldn't be clean for Sundays, but Lauren had worked in hospitals long enough to know that it was easier to build a new wing than to change the laundry schedule.

The two guards had got a gag into the slave's mouth the first time he opened it: he was hanging limp between their hands now, not fighting, strange muffled grunts coming out. They put him down on the other couch and the rarely-used manacles were locked on to him before they took the cuffs off: they didn't remove the shackles. Lauren kept petting the O-negative slave's arm and telling her to relax, but she stayed tense until the guards had gone.

"You'll be okay?" June asked. "I have to get someone - "

"Sure," Lauren said. She got the needle out of the O-negative slave, and praised her as the blood went into the storage unit: they'd test it for viruses at the end of the session. She glanced at the other slave. She wasn't allowed to leave him alone if he was gagged. She got up and petted his arm. "Now if you'll be quiet, I can take that out. No one here's going to hurt you." She waited till he had stopped twisting his head and grunting, and unbuckled the gag and slipped it out. "You just lie there and calm down. I have to get this girl her cookie and orange juice."

She helped the O-negative slave out to the line of chairs, and popped a lemon cookie into her mouth. "You can sit there for fifteen minutes. Give me your hand." She made a circle on the back of the slave's right hand with her red marker pen: all the supervisors knew that meant the slave got light work for the rest of the day, no heavy labor allowed till after they'd had a meal and a sleep. She poured her a cup of orange juice from the jug. "Drink this slowly, all of it."

The next slave - an old hand, a good B-positive - was coming in, nicely timed for his appointment except for the brand-new slave on the other couch. Well, he could be a good example.

"You come on in," Lauren said cheerfully. "We're all ready for you." The new slave was lying still, silent, though he didn't seem exactly relaxed. The B-positive slave looked a bit worried at the sight of the new slave,` shackled and manacled, but Lauren got him to lie down on the couch. "Relax," she told him. "That slave panicked, but you know this is nothing to worry about. Now just lie still and relax. First I have to take just a little bit of your blood to test your iron levels." She was used to talking tense slaves through the process, and she made sure the other slave could hear her. "Now I put the needle in your arm, it'll hurt a little bit, but it's nothing to worry about. You can just lie there and hold on to this. Grip your fist and relax it, good." She went over to the new slave.

"A bit happier now? We might only take a little of your blood today. I'm just going to prick your finger, just a little sting - there! That didn't really hurt, did it? Now just lie there and relax, I'll be back in a few minutes."

The new slave was AB-positive. Lauren looked up as June came back in, an ER intern in tow. "June, he's a rare!"

"He was brought in to get his head stitched," June said, a bit grumpily. "We need to get him turned over."

"No, I can get at it from here," the intern said, moving a chair so he could sit down to it.

"He's an injury?" Lauren was disappointed. "But he's AB-positive, I just checked. I'm going to put him into the system now."

The intern had switched on the bright overhead light and was cleaning the ragged wound.

"Will that need antibiotics?" June asked. They couldn't take blood right now if it did.

The intern shook his head. "He hasn't lost much blood, he's okay for another pint if you want it."

June found the code number on the collar, and read it off digit by digit to Lauren, so she could put it down on the new file card. She handed the card to June, to get the new slave's fingerprints, and went to finish off her B-positive. Once he was settled with a cookie and juice, she brought the next slave in and settled him. This one was B-positive again. The intern finished stitching, reminded the slave he should tell someone right away if the wound felt hot or seemed to be swelling, and went away, yawning.

"Are you going to be good if we take the shackles off?" June said.

The slave swallowed, nodded. He hadn't struggled or tried to cry out in a little while.

"You see we don't usually manacle slaves," Lauren explained. "We don't hurt you, except a little sting when the needle goes in. You just lie there and relax, and then you get a cookie and a drink of juice before you go back to work. That sounds good, doesn't it?"

June was looking the number up on the mainframe terminal. "We can't," she said, annoyed. "He was only bought last week." By policy, the hospital didn't take blood until the slave had been owned by the hospital at least three months.

"Oh," Lauren said, disappointed. "Well, let's get him on the bone marrow register." The hospital didn't own many AB slaves, and they were very useful. She helped the slave stand up and walked him out to the hall: the next slave was already waiting, an A-negative, and she sent her in to June. "You might as well get your cookie and juice," she said conspiratorily. "Give me your hand." She drew the red circle on his hand, and popped a raspberry cookie into his mouth. "We'll see you again in three months."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

**_3. Supervisor_**

Cuddy was woken at nearly noon by the sound of a buzzing phone. Luckily she sounded awake enough: it was Doctor Bryant, head of Nephrology, Board member.

"No, no, I'd been up for hours," she lied. "How can I help you?"

"I've been reading your Diagnostics papers," Doctor Bryant said. "Very interesting, very good work. Not yours, I think?"

"No," Cuddy said. "The Diagnostics slave wrote them, last week."

"Hm," Bryant said. "Will you be able to prove that?"

"I have the notebooks he was using," Cuddy said, after a bump of the heart when she wondered briefly if she_ could_ prove it. Maybe she should have let Greg write the papers in the secretary's office, or somewhere else with proper witnesses. "Also, I suppose the Board could suggest another topic for him to write a paper about, this week, which he could present at the Board meeting."

"Hm, I'm not sure that would suffice..." Doctor Bryant trailed off. "I'm looking at your proposal now. You want to hire a fellow to work for the department? Who do you plan to supervise this fellowship?"

"I'll provide management supervision," Cuddy said gamely. "The Diagnostics slave is Board-qualified in two specialities and has written a paper on Diagnostics as a speciality."

"Are you suggesting you think a slave could supervise a fellowship?"

Cuddy had another heart-bump. This was exactly what she'd doubted herself. "I advocated that the hospital buy this particular slave because of his abilities and qualifications. I certainly wouldn't suggest that _any_ slave could. But I think _this_ slave will be able to."

"Hm," Doctor Bryant said again. "Well, Doctor Cuddy, this is certainly a very interesting project, a very interesting idea. Having a medically-qualified slave on our premises who can write papers like these - if he did, of course - "

Cuddy said nothing, but it took an effort.

"...if he can do all you claim for him, he could certainly be a very useful item of equipment, well worth buying, very much justifying the expense. But the idea of a Diagnostics Department, with a fellowship doctor being supervised by a slave, that's going to be a harder sell. Hm."

Cuddy lay still and closed her eyes. Of course it would. Brenda had called her Saturday afternoon to say Greg had coped just fine with his first day in the clinic, but "coping" and being able to teach, to direct, to give orders to free people...

"A word to the wise," Bryant was saying. "Hm? If you're determined to keep on with this, amend your proposal to a six month trial only, propose internal recruitment. If we're not committed to a three-year fellowship salary, your budget costs fall."

"Thank you very much," Cuddy said. She'd opened her eyes again to stare at the ceiling, juggling budget costs in her head. Yes, that could work, if they could find someone from inside the hospital willing to take on the job. She'd thought it would be easier to advertise, to have a complete stranger come in who didn't even know at the interview that Greg was a slave. "Thank you for taking the time to call me on Sunday, Doctor."

"Very welcome," Bryant said. "These are very good papers. Enjoy your weekend."

Cuddy got up and made coffee and Sunday morning waffles. She tried not to go into the hospital on Sundays: but it was tempting today.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**4. Light Duty**_

There was a settled tradition that if a slave was supposed to be on punishment detail all weekend, and got handed an afternoon of "light duties" because they got taken to the blood bank, they should be used for pick-up duty out somewhere like the loading bay.

Barnes wasn't even sure what Greg was supposed to be being punished for: he wasn't lazy. Eight fading cane marks across his butt said he _had_ been punished, but he was new: new slaves got caned, learned the rules, didn't get caned again. A lazy slave after a Saturday and Sunday morning on close supervision would have a few new cane marks decorating his behind.

But whatever. Greg must have done _something_. Barnes walked him out to the loading bay, and told him to pick up the litter - candy wrappers, fast food boxes, cigarette butts. The slave looked kind of dazed - first time at the blood bank, maybe.

"No rush, boy," Barnes said. "If you get thirsty, go get a drink from that tap. If you need to sit down for five, sit down. You've got all day to do this."

At noon Barnes took a break for lunch: he leashed the slave near enough to the tap that he could reach it for a drink if he wanted. "Back in half an hour. Rest up." The slave had kept moving, hadn't indulged himself with too many sit-down breaks. Barnes sat down with a sandwich and coffee, and learned a couple of interesting facts about the slave: he was Doctor Cuddy's personal slave, though not tagged, and he had spent a large part of Saturday when he was supposed to be being punished, sitting at the reception desk in the free clinic. "Wearing a roll-top and a white coat and getting called 'Doctor', if you can believe it."

Barnes didn't. Okay maybe the roll-top, a slave who was sitting reception desk would likely wear one. But who in their right minds would give a slave a white coat and call him "Doctor" - except in a porn movie maybe. Yeah, that would work.

Back at work, Barnes released the slave and told him to get back to work. The slave was pretty dirty, cleaned up only where he'd been examined by ER, but he had a nice body. Barnes lit a cigarette - okay, he was on duty, but the bay was deserted, no one was going to see - and watched the slave move. It was sheltered and warm in the bay. Barnes got a kinky idea: he could tell the slave to strip off. Make him do his work naked. He palmed himself through his pants, thinking about it, running the fantasy through his head: the slave naked except for his white coat and crawling about, a naked woman holding him on his leash, calling him 'Doctor'.

PPTH were pretty strict about staff taking unauthorized breaks from their work to screw the slaves. Barnes was due to finish at five, and he was supposed to take the slave back in and turn him over to the weekend overseer, but who the fucking hell would care if he was a few minutes late? Other staff did it all the time.

He called the slave over when it was a few minutes to five. The slave was pretty dirty all over, but somehow that just added to the appeal. "Come here," Barnes told him. "Down on your knees. Mouth open wide, that's it - " He fed the slave his dick, hard already from his fantasies. "Now suck it, 'Doctor', good boy - " He worked his hands into the slave's short hair, jerking his head closer. "Nice," he muttered breathlessly. "Suck it, 'Doctor'..."

The slave gave a pretty good blowjob, though he had to be told to swallow - Barnes wasn't having any spit-out cum left there for Monday morning. Barnes petted his head and fumbled in his pockets for a treat. He couldn't find anything. "Okay. Good boy, on your feet, let's go back inside. You did a pretty good job today."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**5. Jon**_

Crazy slaves tended not to live very long. Jon wasn't sure yet if Greg was actually crazy, or if he'd just heard what he wanted to hear when Doctor Cuddy talked to him. It didn't make a lot of difference either way, Jon decided: the poor bastard was going to blow up when the real world kicked him in the face, and when he blew up, the main thing was to make sure he didn't take anyone else with him.

Jon tried to explain this to the Peach, much later that Sunday. When he finally managed to get out what he meant, the Peach looked as puzzled as before.

"We can't stop him from blowing up," she pointed out.

"We can steer clear," Jon said. He'd been thinking about this as hard as he'd ever thought about anything. "We don't talk to him. We don't ask him for anything. We don't take anything he offers, if he comes round to that. We don't try to keep him out of trouble with security."

"You're the only one who tries _that_," the Peach said.

Jon shrugged. Greg had nightmares. Loud ones. Jon had woken him up and got him to be quiet, more than once: he wasn't even sure if Greg remembered it, the guy was always pretty deep asleep. It scared Jon, it scared the shit out of him, to think of just lying there awake and letting any slave scream till the guards unlocked the dorm and came in.

"I don't like trouble," he said, as mildly as he could. "But the more trouble Greg has with security, the faster he goes."

The Peach nodded. "I'll talk to people."

People would listen to her. Jon nodded, satisfied.

"_We_ need to talk to Kev," the Peach said. "He'll listen to you."

Later, Jon watched Greg in the showers, disturbed despite himself at what they planned to do. He wondered if Greg realized he wasn't getting jostled, he wouldn't be shoved or tripped, if he would understand what had happened to him.

But they had to do it. Crazy slaves were dangerous. Greg could do a lot of damage if they let him.

_tba_

_Tailkinker will post Greg's Story about Sunday tomorrow. Hope you're enjoying it: you're all a bit silent out there in the dark...  
><em>


	12. Day 11

_A long Monday! The first day of Greg's second week as a slave at PPTH. Do you really need warnings after the first ten days? There are slaves: Greg is one of them. _

**Day Eleven (Monday)**

**_1. Overseer_**

Liam Torres had been on duty over the weekend. He hadn't called her in, but Doris read his memo wondering if he should have. Just after Doris had gone home for the weekend, Doctor Cuddy had called to say that she wanted her slave Greg put on punishment detail till he was to report to her on Monday morning. Johnson had already reported that Greg had missed exercise - again - but Doris had decided to take no action beyond planning to meet with Doctor Cuddy on Monday.

There were two or three other small matters, and finally Liam noted that Greg had had to be sent up to the ER on Sunday after he slipped on wet tiles and hit his head. Not a serious injury: Greg had been put on light duty afterwards, picking up litter in the main loading bay. The man assigned to supervise him had reported that he'd done a good job, no laziness: given Greg's good behavior, Liam had decided to terminate the punishment detail on Sunday night, rather than have someone follow Greg about with a cane on Monday morning, and he sent a punishment report to Doctor Cuddy, a copy of which was attached.

There were at least no further memos about Greg. Doris finished looking through the weekend's paperwork, and glanced at the clock: Doctor Cuddy should be in. She placed a call.

Doctor Cuddy would be very pleased to meet with her and suggested a time after the free clinic had closed for the afternoon, so that Brenda Previn, who would be supervising Greg when he was at work there, could also be present.

"Any problems with Greg over the weekend?" Cuddy asked, almost it seemed as an afterthought. "He should report to me at eight, but I intend to have him work in the clinic this morning - I'll see him afterwards."

"No problems," Doris said after a moment. "You'll get a full report from Liam Torres. Does Greg know you intend him to report to the clinic at eight instead of your office?"

There was a moment's silence at the other end. Doris sighed. "I'll have Greg cleaned up for his 'clinic duty' at eight, Doctor Cuddy. I presume he'll be under Brenda Previn's direct supervision there. It would help if you could let me know these changes in his schedule and supervision at least a day before they take place, not afterwards."

It was nearly seven-thirty: Greg should be fetched. Doris went out into the hall, and saw Greg coming down the stairs into the basement, moving fast, holding his cleaning kit so that it didn't rattle. He stopped short when he saw her, and after a frozen moment, he dropped to his knees.

"On your feet, Greg. Doctor Cuddy's already told me you're supposed to report to Nurse Previn in the clinic at eight, not to her." Doris escorted him to the showers and got a towel for him. He did a good job of washing despite the cold water, then she walked him back to his dorm. "Kneel down," she told him while he was still naked. She checked the head injury: minor, and looked healthy. "All right, get dressed."

"You should take one of your rolltops and a labcoat," Doris told him while he was pulling on his clothes. "Don't put them on in the basement, and take them off before you come back downstairs to put them away again." The point of Greg wearing them was supposed to be that patients didn't see immediately that he was a slave, though Doris thought that anyone who worked with slaves would see it right away - perhaps it would take other people a bit longer. "You should put them on and take them off in the first floor stairwell, before you go into the hall."

"Yes, ma'am." Greg was dressed in his smart clothes. He picked up the rolltop and labcoat, holding them carefully in his arms. He didn't sound docile or disciplined.

Doris glanced at her watch. Ten of eight. "I expect you think that people won't know what you are when your collar is hidden, Greg. Some people might not, especially people who aren't giving you more than a passing glance. Just remember: you're still the property of the hospital. You'll be encountering free people, people who don't work for this hospital. Any disrespect from you, any complaints from others, and you _will_ be subject to my discipline, and serious complaints from free people may mean you have to be whipped."

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said again. This time he sounded a bit more docile.

"Doctor Cuddy will get a good report on your behavior this weekend," Doris told him. "Let's see that continue."

"Thank you, ma'am."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**2. Smith**_

Mike Smith had been thinking about this over the weekend. His doctor had talked to him some more about what Previn had told him: he was lucky, the doctor said, his employers (Mike hadn't told her anything more) had spotted his diabetes so early. He'd have to make a lot of changes in his diet, take up an exercise program. But there was virtually no secondary damage yet, and if he took care of himself, there might not be.

He came to work that morning and didn't have donuts. He was trying to drink less coffee, too, but the doctor told him not to make too many changes at once.

The big boy was cleaning a bathroom on the second floor. He glanced to see who it was and didn't stop working. Smith walked out again. There was a disused office nearby - Except there wasn't: sometime since last week the hospital had put someone in there and the door was locked. The slave came out of the bathroom, gave Smith a scared look, and was heading down the hall to the next bathroom when Smith put a hand on his arm to stop him, and glanced back at the security station. Someone was already sitting there. This was weird enough that Smith didn't want to do it in the halls.

"Okay, boy, you follow me." Probably no one else would be in the Sanitation office this time of day.

"Sir - " The slave's voice was shaky. "I'm supposed to be cleaning bathrooms till half of seven."

"I know." Smith glanced back at him. "Don't worry, boy, I'll see you don't get in trouble for this."

The slave dropped to his knees as soon as they were inside the small office. Smith sat down in his usual chair. Damn, this was difficult.

"Listen, you ever tell anyone about this, boy, I can make your life more difficult than you can imagine - " Smith heard his voice blustering. That wasn't how he'd meant to start.

"Brenda Previn talked to me last Wednesday," he said finally. "She's the nurse who runs the free clinic here. She told me I should get tested, for free, and I did, and turns out I have diabetes. The good type, my doctor says. Diet controlled. Guess I've never been too good at that. Came out of the blue."

The slave just knelt there, looking at him. He had really blue eyes himself.

"I thought your mom or your dad had to have diabetes. Mine didn't. None of my grandparents had diabetes even. Anyway Previn told me," Smith cleared his throat, because this was the difficult part, "you used to be a doctor. Told me you'd diagnosed me, just by looking at me. That was why she'd come looking for me, to get me tested, to find out if you were right, and you were."

The slave still just looked.

"So, what I guess I figured I should say, is thank you." Smith stood up abruptly. "I'm glad you aren't working in Sanitation regular. Thought you were doing whatever for Doctor Cuddy now. Get up, boy."

The slave got to his feet. He stood awkwardly, as if he didn't know what to do with his hands. Smith held out his right hand. "This is the bit that I'm going to see you regret it if you tell anyone," he said. After a moment, still awkwardly, the slave shook hands with him, and Smith said, "Thank you."

A moment after their hands let go, the slave said, shakily, "You're welcome... sir."

"Okay," Smith said, now wanting nothing but to end this and get the slave out of here. He glanced at his watch. After seven. "Go clean the first floor bathrooms, by the canteen. Get back to whatever you're supposed to do after that, and if anyone asks, those bathrooms were filthy and I told you to clean them."

The slave disappeared fast and without another word. Smith sat down again. This was worse than going through AA the first time. He'd done a lot of crap, that long ago time, but he'd never had to shake a slave's hand before.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**3. Nurse**_

Brenda Previn arrived at the hospital at twenty past seven and headed directly for the first floor bathroom. Only one of the cubicles was in use, but three nursing students were hanging on to each other giggling by the sinks. Brenda raised her eyebrows at them and was heading into one of the free cubicles, when one of the students managed to stop giggling in time to say "Ms Previn, sorry - "

"What is it?" Brenda couldn't remember the girl's name.

"One of the cleaning slaves is in the other cubicle," the girl said, pointing.

"He just _scuttled_ in there when we came in," one of the other girls said, still laughing. "We're waiting for him to come out."

The third girl said something, lost in a scream of laughter. She sounded very tired, Brenda realized; the three of them were probably not long off their night shift, which excused a lot of silliness. But this had to be ended.

"Sorry, Ms Previn," the first girl said, again. "I just thought, if you knew, you might not want to - " Her voice trailed off.

Brenda had put on her worst scowl. "Get out of here," she said sharply. She added a few blistering words on their silliness, and was pleased to see them color and trail out of the room, no longer giggling. They'd probably start again before they were half way to their lockers, but at least they wouldn't be occupying a busy bathroom.

She had her suspicions about which male cleaning slave would have ducked into a cubicle rather than, as cleaning slaves generally did, unobtrusively left the room. "Get out of there," she told the closed door.

Greg opened the door and came out, head ducked.

"Did they see you?" Brenda asked him.

Greg looked up, and looked startled. "No, ma'am," he said. " - Nurse Previn," he corrected himself.

"Good," Brenda said. "Get down to the basement and change into your clinic clothes. You should _not_ be wandering around the hospital like a cleaning slave where anyone can see you."

Four of the nurses who'd volunteered for the first shift on Monday morning - and one of the doctors - had shown up before eight. Brenda got Greg seated behind the clinic reception desk, admission forms at the ready - the first patients were already shuffling in - and hustled all five of them into the nearest exam room.

"You may already know this - Greg started work on Saturday," she said. "Our admissions clerk out there is a slave, Greg. He's here as a member of the clinic staff and I want none of you playing any silly jokes on him or wasting his time."

Manda Philips, always plugged into the gossip line, opened her mouth. Brenda ploughed right on. "He was a qualified doctor before his license was revoked. The hospital is applying to have his license reactivated, and he will then be able to treat patients in this clinic. He'll be working here four hours a day, every day, from now on - as of next week as one of the medical staff."

Doctor Bailey asked, as if only mildly interested, "Does this mean fewer volunteers will be needed? Or is the clinic expanding?"

Brenda looked at her sharply. Lilian Bailey looked back, quite undisconcerted. She must already know something.

Brenda went on, "Today and for the rest of the week Greg isn't going to be doing anything more than any clerical worker would do. But when he's treating patients, you will have to call him 'Doctor House' in front of the patients. In front of any of the patients, not just those he happens to be seeing. His collar is concealed because we don't want people outside the hospital knowing that a slave is working as a doctor: it's not illegal or unethical, but any gossip about the 'slave doctor' could discourage people from coming into the free clinic, and I won't tolerate that." She made eye contact with each of them, and glanced at the clock on the wall: one minute past eight. "If you have any other questions, Doctor Cuddy has let me know you should make an appointment with her this week. Let's go."

Doctor Campbell was leaning up against the reception desk, glancing at his watch. "I was wondering where you all were," he remarked pleasantly. "This is 'Greg', is it?"

"We should - " Brenda said, and Campbell overrode her, speaking dismissively. "Sanchez told me all about him, and yes, I've already made an appointment with Doctor Cuddy. "

Brenda shrugged, and said crisply, "Exam room one."

Jo Brown, five minutes late as usual, came in breathlessly full of apologies, and Brenda shut her up and sent her off to check the clinic stockroom. She glanced at Greg, who didn't seem to be paying attention to anything but the patients who were filling in and returning the admission forms. He would be all right for a few minutes: she'd go talk to Brown. Greg could be sent to work in the stockroom later when the second shift of volunteers arrived, and that would let Brenda clarify the situation to any volunteers who hadn't yet heard.

When the last patient left, at quarter of one, Brenda unpacked an extra sandwich from her lunch and set it on the desk in front of Greg. "Get me a coffee with milk and two sugars. We'll tidy up the exam rooms after lunch."

Greg obeyed her promptly. He came back with a single cup, and set it down in front of her. Before he could sit down again, Brenda said "Do you drink coffee?"

Greg froze. He was staring at her with wide blue eyes. He didn't say anything for a long moment. Then he went to his knees. "This slave didn't drink any coffee," he said, in a small, somehow horrified voice. He bowed his head and put his hands behind his back. "Ma'am. I didn't, I didn't drink any..."

"Oh get_ up_," Brenda said, really cross. "You've been told, more than once. No kneeling. Stop talking like that. Sit down, eat your sandwich, and just answer the question."

Apparently one of the nurses had offered Greg some coffee earlier. Greg hadn't accepted it, but he seemed to be worried that Brenda had intended it as some kind of silly "test".

"Don't be ridiculous," Brenda said, when she finally got that clear. "None of us should have time for those kind of stupid games. If I hear that one of the clinic staff were wasting their time on something like that, I'll be very angry with them." She finished the last bite of her sandwich, chasing it with the last mouthful of coffee. "If I send you for a coffee, like I did just now, you can get a cup for yourself, if you want one."

Greg looked disconcerted. He finished his sandwich, and glanced at the coffeemaker, a bit wistfully.

"Too late," Brenda said with grim humor. She stood up, and Greg with her. "Remember that for next time, I don't like timewasters." She was gathering the wrappings of the bag lunch together. "Doctor Cuddy's expecting you at her office at two. You'd better start on exam room one."

"I'm sorry, Nurse Previn," Greg said. He sounded worried, now. "I'm supposed to go to the groomer at one-thirty."

"What?" Brenda looked Greg over. She'd thought when she saw him in his rolltop and white coat that he would look much neater if he were clean-shaven.

Greg started to take his labcoat off. "The time's written on my back, Nurse Previn," he said.

"Keep that on," Brenda said sharply. "All right, leave when you have to. You might as well go directly to Doctor Cuddy's office from this 'groomer'. Get to work."

Lisa had arranged a meeting with Doris Foster for two-thirty to discuss Greg - she'd warned Brenda that Foster, the senior overseer of PPTH's slaves, was likely to raise a host of difficulties. ("That's maybe not a bad thing," Brenda had pointed out, mildly for her, and got a disgusted sigh from Lisa.)

She wasn't sure if she would know Foster by sight, but she recognized her when she saw her sitting in one of the visitor's chairs just outside Lisa's office: a very upright, dry-looking woman in her early fifties. Brenda sat down beside her. Foster looked at her. "Nurse Previn," she said, and held out her hand, formally.

"Mrs Foster," Brenda said, equally polite. She glanced at the clock. Just on the half hour. She must remember to call Lisa "Doctor Cuddy," during the meeting. It wouldn't matter if Lisa slipped and called her "Brenda," doctors did that.

The door opened and Greg came out, holding a notebook and a couple of pens. Foster stood up, and Greg - Brenda stifled a grin - seemed to sidle, like a crab. He moved unobtrusively to one side, ducked his head, and began moving quietly towards the hall.

"Greg," Mrs Foster said sharply, and he froze. "You're not in the clinic now, Greg. Take that labcoat and rolltop off."

Yet another thing they'd have to discuss. Brenda made a mental note of that. She nodded at Greg, and went into Lisa's office.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**4. Supervisor**_

There were two memos about Greg in the interdepartmental mail.

A formal acknowledgement from Slave Blood Collection, which Cuddy had vague knowledge was held in the ER somewhere every Sunday, that the slave ID number whatever was now registered, AB+/rare, collection would normally begin three months from purchase date, supervisor would not be specially informed of regular collections unless a request was made, but if a collection was required at a shorter time that the usual 12 week intervals the supervisor's permission would be sought if possible and the supervisor would be notified afterwards, etc. There was also a leaflet explaining the value of blood, which was clearly a very standard inclusion, and a form to be filled in if the supervisor wanted the slave exempted from blood collection, on a one-off or a regular basis.

The memo from Liam Torres was shorter. Greg's punishment detail had been carried out on Saturday and Sunday, as per Doctor Cuddy's request: Greg had been obedient, worked hard, and required no further disciplinary action, so, with apologies, the punishment detail had been terminated on Sunday evening and Greg would simply be sent to regular Sanitation duty for Monday morning: it was hoped that Doctor Cuddy was satisfied by this as weekday punishment detail was normally reserved for slaves who were persistently disobedient or lazy.

Cuddy raised her eyebrows over that. She'd sent Greg to work all weekend at whatever physical labor the overseer wanted to assign him to - that would have been enough of a punishment, a better one than caning. It sounded as if the overseer had misunderstood her. Almost a pity she'd already arranged the meeting with Doris Foster: she'd have enjoyed writing her a memo explaining that.

She flipped over the page to check what was written on the other side, and her heart nearly stopped. "On Sunday morning the slave had an accident and injured his scalp. In my judgement this was not self-harm and no disciplinary action is required. Minor injury, three stitches. ER marked the slave for light duty, so a light punishment detail was assigned for the remainder of Sunday."

Cuddy only realized that adrenalin had put her on her feet, reaching for the phone, when she felt her hand grasp it: she wanted to call Mrs Foster immediately, demand to see Greg, confirm he was all right. Of course Greg was insured for what he'd cost the hospital. But he couldn't be insured for his potential value. If he had struck his head, if he had suffered brain damage - If he could still work as a laborer but not as a doctor, all her plans were suddenly shattered. If he had been killed, in a stupid accident -

She deliberately sat down. It was past ten: Greg would be at work in the clinic. If he had suffered any real harm over the weekend, Brenda would already have contacted her. This probably was just what the stupid man who'd written the memo had thought: a minor injury that needed a few stitches. She'd see Greg at two, and confirm then to her own satisfaction that he wasn't harmed. She put this out of her mind, and turned to her work.

At two, sharp, Greg appeared at her door. For a moment, Cuddy just stared at him. His hair had been neatly trimmed, he was cleanshaven, the rolltop hid his collar, and he was wearing his white labcoat. He looked like Greg House had looked on the rare occasions he had decided to tidy himself up and present himself formally.

Then he moved into the room, with the by-now familiar hesitating step and with his hands trying to go behind his back, his head ducking in a half-bow, and the illusion was lost. He wasn't Greg House any more. Cuddy stood up and told him to close the door and sit down. She moved round behind him and checked his scalp: the tear in the skin had probably bled a lot at first, and the hair around it was still messy with the spray-on bandage that had been applied. But it was a minor injury, and Cuddy let out a faint sigh of relief.

"How did this happen?" Cuddy asked, making her voice neutral.

"It was an accident," Greg said. He sounded worried. "I slipped in s-some water. I hit my head. I didn't - didn't mean to - "

"That's fine," Cuddy said. She moved back to her desk. "Let me hear you answer the following questions." She had requested past papers the licensing board had set, and had her secretary type the questions from them in random order. She asked Greg a couple of them, and was pleased when his voice got crisper, more certain, as he replied.

"For the rest of the week, you'll be working in the clinic every morning. I'll be meeting with Nurse Previn and the other medical staff, and I want to hear good reports of your behavior. You're to report to me at seven-thirty each morning: go back to your office when Nurse Previn says your work in the clinic is done. Don't miss your meals or your exercise. The rest of the time I want you in your office, revising from the library books. Take notes so that I can confirm you're working - I want to see your notebook every morning. Use these questions as a guideline for your study areas. I'll want to see answers to these questions as part of your working notes." She handed him the list of questions - she had the other copy.

Greg didn't move or react. Cuddy was used to that now. He wasn't Greg House, whatever he looked like. There was the little automaton-pause, and "Yes, ma'am." He got up and looked as if he wanted to hold his hand out - absurdly as if he wanted to shake hands.

"Well?" Cuddy asked, sharply. Greg's hands went together - not behind his back, but awkwardly on his stomach, wrists crossed. He swallowed, a big nervous gulp.

"Ma'am, this slave doesn't have a key to the office," he said. "Can this slave have - have the key?"

"What?" Cuddy stared. Oh, yes, she had taken the key end of day Friday, to remove any temptation Greg might have felt to run back to the office and hide there from hard work under the excuse of "But Doctor Cuddy said". But where had she put it? It took her a few minutes - Greg never said a word or seemed to move - until she found it in the paperclip tray of her desk. She held it out to him. It was already time for her meeting with Brenda and Mrs Foster. "Run along," she said crisply.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**5. Secretary**_

They'd had coffee and cakes at the new cafe on Wednesday after work, the first time Paige had said "Anyone would think you don't like working for a woman," as they were choosing cupcakes from the glass-fronted shelves.

"I like working for women," Mia Rivera said, selecting a yellow cupcake with white frosting. "I just don't like _her_."

Doctor Cuddy had turned into "her" from nearly the first week she'd been added to the pool of administrators, and yes, she was the only woman out of the six, but Mia had worked for women before, and she didn't like Doctor Cuddy for all sorts of reasons. including the twelve-hour days, the complete lack of a personal life, the willingness to dress to maximise her assets and to use a cold kind of flirting with men to get her way. Mia figured that in five years Doctor Cuddy would be a very rich man's trophy wife - or would have parlayed some kind of hold over a very influential man to get a better job at some much bigger hospital, but Mia was pretty sure they'd all be invited to contribute to Doctor Cuddy's wedding present within five years. Unless she crashed and burned completely: she certainly spent a lot on clothes.

They collected their coffee and went to a table at the back. "Is it true she got the hospital to buy her a personal assistant?" Paige asked.

"She was working with a new slave for a couple of days last week," Mia admitted, wondering if she should say this much. She liked Paige, and she trusted her as far as workplace friendship went, but both of them worked with confidential information and didn't spill it to each other. She knew what Doctor Cuddy planned for the slave, and supposed the plan was meant to remain confidential until the next Board meeting.

"Tall boy, blue eyes, looks athletic?" Paige said. "I hear Doctor Cuddy's been ... working with him quite a bit more than a couple of _days_. Taken him outside the hospital and dressed him up in fancy clothes." She raised her eyebrows and gave Mia a grin that invited speculation. "There's a Board meeting Friday next, is she going to be promoted?"

Of course if Doctor Cuddy were bumped up another level or two she would be entitled to a personal assistant chattel. And she would no longer be in Mia's pool of administrators - and Mia had already decided that if she were asked to move up with Cuddy, she'd say no, even if it meant a salary increase: it just wouldn't be worth the aggravation. But it was Mia's opinion that Doctor Cuddy was a cold bitch: she was just about the last person Mia could imagine buying a slave for sexual purposes, and the boy couldn't type.

She said that to Paige, who looked doubtful. "Everyone says she's treating _this_ slave like he was her pet, though."

Mia bit her tongue. She _knew_ what Cuddy had planned for this slave, and it was certain to turn into one of those embarrassing mistakes that a perfect secretary would just forget she'd ever typed up. But by the time seven Board members and their personal assistants knew all about it, it wouldn't exactly be a secret any more, from anyone in the hospital, and Mia had never pretended to be a _perfect_ secretary: "I can't tell you till the Board meeting," she compromised. "She's got plans for this slave, but she's not using him like that. She's working her usual Ms I Have No Life hours, and I think she barely sees him - he spends most of his time down in an empty room on the second floor."

"I suppose if she was taking him home with her, _everybody_ would know," Paige said, letting go of that theory reluctantly.

Next Monday after work Mia was late at the coffee shop: the meeting Doctor Cuddy had promised would take no more than an hour had gone on for nearly ninety minutes, and she'd had to type up the minutes and copy them to Brenda Previn and Mrs Foster as well as Cuddy, for their approval, and then get on with the work this meeting had delayed.

"In fact, I wouldn't be here _now_ except Mrs Foster said they had to finish the meeting at four. I wish I worked for her," Mia said, picking an aggressively red cupcake out of the selection remaining.

"Who's she? A donor?"

"No. She works in the basement, some kind of overseer for the slaves."

Paige stared. "I thought you always said you hated working with slaves!"

"That's not what I meant," Mia said. "I just meant, I like working for women when they're like _her_." Mrs Foster had been crisp, polite, and insistent that everything be _exactly_ specified. She'd also sounded as if she thought Doctor Cuddy was a fool, and behind a professionally expressionless face, Mia had loved hearing that.

But Doctor Cuddy had got her own way on almost every point, tempered sometimes by Brenda Previn's suggestions: the only thing to which Mrs Foster had held firmly was that Greg was to sleep in the basement in a locked dorm (where else would a slave sleep? Mia had wondered: Doctor Cuddy didn't seem to have a suggestion).

"Was this about Doctor Cuddy's boy?" Paige asked. "He's working in the free clinic at the reception desk, you know. Dressed up smart, in a white coat and everything, people were saying you can't really tell he's wearing a collar."

Mia nodded. One of the minutes had specified that Greg was, at all times, to wear clothing suitable for working with free people, and that except when in the basement, he was to wear a rolltop concealing his collar. He was to wear a white labcoat when dealing directly with patients or doing any work in the clinic.

("And when he's cleaning the Diagnostics office?" Mrs Foster had asked. "He won't," Doctor Cuddy said, which Brenda Previn had backed up emphatically, to Mia's surprise: Previn had seemed like a sensible woman. "We can't have him working as a cleaning slave and as a doctor. The Diagnostics office will have to be on the usual cleaning rotas.")

"You don't look surprised," Paige said observantly.

"I'm not," Mia said honestly. "Did you know a slave can be a physician?"

("Greg will be working as a doctor. He should be able to get a meal from the slave canteens whenever they're open, shower and change his clothes whenever he needs to without my getting called by security, and pick his own hour for daily exercise. And he won't take part in your 'Sunday morning cleaning' either." That last had come out with unexpected venom: Mia had seen Previn and Foster glance at each other, disconcerted: but Mrs Foster had, smoothly, agreed to all of that, so long as it was clearly minuted as Doctor Cuddy's specification. Previn had tucked in her own specification: Greg needed to be able to tell the groomer when he wanted to be shaved, not have the groomer set an appointment for him.)

Paige was staring at her, mouth open in bewilderment. "No, they can't," she said, as if reminding Mia of something obvious. "They're _slaves_." Her mouth closed with a snap. "Oh my God, Mia, you mean Doctor Cuddy's boy? *That's* why he's in the clinic? But he can't treat _people_, can he?"

"I don't know," Mia said. She could not imagine the slave who knelt and begged permission for _breathing_, practically, as a doctor of anything. But the meeting this afternoon seemed to take it for granted that he would be.

The longest argument had wrangled over the most absurd issue; Doctor Cuddy was insistent that no one _but_ her should be allowed to discipline the slave. Recriminations over Doctor Cuddy assigning him to a weekend's punishment detail for missing an hour's exercise, countered by recriminations over an overseer stupidly misunderstanding what Doctor Cuddy had clearly said, had ebbed and flowed - and Mia had sat still, pen poised, fully aware that this constituted a part of the meeting she was _not_ supposed to minute. But finally, Mrs Foster had given a small grim smile and conceded even that point: all disciplinary matters concerning Greg were to be referred to Doctor Cuddy.

("Though if you're not accustomed to using a cane, I suggest you allow a more experienced hand to carry out the discipline," Mrs Foster had said. "Properly used a cane inflicts no more and no less pain than you intend.")

"Mia, are you all right?" Paige said.

"Just thinking," Mia said, and stirred her coffee. She'd been assuming this idea of Doctor Cuddy's was going to be one big embarrassing flop, but quickly over and done with. Cuddy would recover and eventually move on, marriage or promotion or enslavement for debt as a fashion victim, Mia did not really care. And she thought Mrs Foster assumed it would be a quick flop, too. But Brenda Previn didn't. Previn and Cuddy were friends, of course, but Previn wasn't a silly woman. Cuddy had this "Diagnostics department" budgeted, all but the final Board vote, including a six-month fellowship, even. What if the Board _didn't_ just laugh themselves sick and vote it down? What if the medical licensing board actually agreed to let a slave practise medicine? What if this whole thing dragged on for _another_ six months?

Mia looked at Paige. "I think I need a new job." She picked up the red cupcake, and bit into it: the inside turned out to be chocolate.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**6. Exercise**_

At seven in the morning, when the first shift of pallid, tired night slaves came stumbling into the exercise field and shuffled round in a herd of boredom, Matt Johnson found it hard to love his job. But he got an hour-long coffee break after that, for breakfast, before the next shifts of slaves (wider awake, these were day shift slaves in middle of the morning) and a flexible lunch break with plenty of time to do the administrative work required. His favorite time of day was the last two hours before four: he usually managed to arrange for a male dorm to take their exercise at the end of the day, and there was usually at least one boy the right age and build to appeal to him, who wouldn't get upset over getting to lift his ass for Mr Johnson afterwards.

Matt didn't like them pretty and he didn't like them young: he liked them in their thirties, give or take a decade either way, with a bit of muscle on their bones, a good solid ass, and a good attitude: they didn't _have_ to get off on his fucking them, he certainly wasn't going to jerk them off, but he liked it when they did come. He liked it known that Mr Johnson didn't play favorites - any slave who acted like he was something special because he'd been assfucked by the supervisor would get a caning. But he did have three or four slaves he liked especially, big strong boys who could help with clean-up and take it up the ass. Greg was new but he was definitely a nice addition to that roster.

Matt was giving Greg a square of the chocolate he kept to treat a good slave, when Mrs Foster walked in. She clucked her tongue at the sight, and Matt grinned wickedly, deliberately breaking off another square and letting Greg have two - after all, he'd worked hard cleaning up the equipment, and he'd come from being fucked. "Good boy. Now get dressed and get out of here."

"You'll spoil that boy," Mrs Foster said, but she sounded as if she was saying it almost automatically. "Greg, get out and close the door, you can dress in the hall. Then go to my office and wait for me there." Once the door was closed, Mrs Foster picked a clean bench and sat down. "I don't know why I bother," she said, sounding tired. "Feed him all the chocolate you like."

"What?" Matt was worried. He sat down on the bench beside Mrs Foster. He liked her - aside from anything else, she'd got him this job after he'd thought he was going to have to struggle along on disability. His back wouldn't stand a regular security guard's duty any more, but he'd always been good at handling slaves. "What's wrong?"

"I had a meeting with one of the administrators today," Mrs Foster said, "About Greg, as a matter of fact."

"With Doctor Cuddy?" Matt wasn't particularly worried: he didn't fuck tagged slaves, and he didn't fuck slaves during his work hours, and slaves who hadn't been tagged were free for anyone.

"Doctor Cuddy has a special work schedule for her boy," Mrs Foster said. "She says that as his hours will be irregular and she can't say what they will be from day to day - "

Matt snorted. That sounded like extreme inefficiency.

" - she wants to leave it up to the slave himself to 'decide' when to go for exercise. He's still to do an hour a day, let me know if he 'decides' just not to show up."

"You're kidding me," Matt said, in flat unbelief.

"I wish I were," Mrs Foster said. She looked at him sharply. "Mind, I don't want you repeating that. I told Doctor Cuddy I'd arrange with the basement staff for Greg to have the kind of undetermined schedule she thinks he needs, and I will. You're to let Greg take an hour's exercise whenever he sees fit to show up, and if he doesn't show up at all, let me know at the end of the day. Oh, and you're not to cane him."

"I haven't yet," Matt said. "He's not lazy - when he shows up. I'm to send him along to you, right in the middle of exercise, if he needs to be caned?"

"No," Mrs Foster said. "You're to let me know, in writing, that you _would_ have caned Greg, and why. No one but Doctor Cuddy is to cane him from now on."

"Seriously?" Matt actually laughed. "Doctor Cuddy's going to come all the way down here to give him a couple of starters if he's feeling lazy, or something like that?"

Mrs Foster wasn't laughing. "I'll turn everyone's disciplinary reports on Greg over to Doctor Cuddy: she'll decide what action to take."

Matt shook his head. "I don't fucking believe it - pardon me," he added hastily, though Mrs Foster didn't look too offended. "Are you going to tell _Greg_ we can't cane him?"

"I'm going to tell Greg what his new rules are," Mrs Foster said. "I imagine he'll work out quite soon that he won't now be caned by us. He's not stupid. We have Doctor Cuddy's explicit, specific instructions as to how much freedom we have to give him, and I've now told you." She shut her mouth tight at the end of that sentence, and looked at Matt coldly.

"Okay," Matt said, getting it. Mrs Foster was giving Doctor Cuddy enough rope to hang herself, and the rope was Greg.

_tba_

_Okay, Monday from Greg's POV is posted at Tailkinker's profile tomorrow._


	13. Day 12

_Warnings for violence, drugging, coffee. There are slaves at PPTH and Greg House is one of them. Please pay attention to all previous warnings. Don't run with scissors._

**Day Twelve (Tuesday)**

**_1. Security_**

There was a doctor asleep over his desk in the new office. Young saw it as he passed, and thought it odd: medical students slept like that, interns occasionally did, but he couldn't think of a reason for either to be in a second-floor office, or why a doctor wouldn't at least have sat down in a more comfortable chair for a nap, and closed the door. It was about half past four in the morning, when no one except slaves and night security should be in the offices and halls. Young went into the office minded to suggest gently that if the doctor didn't have a home to go to, at least he should sit down in one of the armchairs - and with a tiny part of his mind, thinking that a dead man would lie like that.

The doctor was alive, and when Young touched his shoulder and he sat up, turned out not to be a doctor at all. The slave who sat on the floor in this office and read books was now sitting at the desk, dressed up like a doctor, fast asleep. It was so outrageous it was almost funny: Young looked around, half-expecting to find a camera taping his surprise, or medical students ready to jump out - though why pick on him?

The slave had lurched obediently from the chair to his knees, and blinked up at Young with wide dopey eyes.

"Who told you you could wear that?" Young wanted to know, tugging at the slave's rolltop - it did a pretty good job of hiding his collar, until you were up close. "And this?" He tugged at the white labcoat. "Come on, get them off." He wasn't angry with the slave - it seemed pretty evident that someone had doped the slave and dressed him up and put him here, for what purpose Young could hardly imagine. Still, not the slave's fault.

"Mrs Foster said I could," the slave said. He was still half-asleep: Young got him to repeat that, but he definitely said 'Mrs Foster', the name of the hospital's head overseer. Young could pretty well imagine it: "Tell them 'Mrs Foster' when they ask you."

Movement in the hallway: another slave came out of the nearby bathroom. Young called to him.

"Is this one of the hospital slaves? You recognize him?"

"Yes, sir." The slave glanced at the boy on the floor, and nodded. "He sleeps in my dorm."

"Where the fuck is he supposed to be?" Young was speaking to himself now: the slave waited. "Do you know who his supervisor is?"

"Yes, sir. Doctor Cuddy."

She was one of the hospital administrators, and not a popular one either: this could be a prank on her, to see if he'd call her before five in the morning. Not fucking likely. Young waved the slave out. Doctor Cuddy's boy was kneeling in better form, knees apart, hands behind his back.

"What the hell am I supposed to do with you?"

"This slave works in the clinic," the slave said, his voice muddled and yawning. "This slave... I need to be there at eight."

The free clinic opened at eight, just after Young went off shift. If this was the same slave - Young didn't pay much attention to what slaves looked like - he was usually found doing nothing but sit in this office from four in the morning looking through books, and security had been told that was what he was supposed to do. There were dirtier rumors, but there always were.

"Okay, boy, let's keep you awake." The slave was wearing clothes that could have been worn by a free man. "Get your clothes off. Yeah, all of them. Fold them up there." There was an old alarm clock on the desk: Young set it to go off at twenty minutes to eight. "I'm going to be passing by this office and every time I do, you better be on your feet, walking up and down. Got it? Walk. You don't leave the office, you don't put your clothes on, just walk. Let's see you do it."

The slave made a meandering route from the door to the window, and back again, naked except for his collar. He still looked sleepy.

"You can get dressed and leave this office and go to the clinic when the alarm goes off," Young told him. The slave had eight fading cane-marks on his butt, and Young turned him round and slapped him there, hard. "Listen up! On your feet, in this office, walking about, till the alarm goes off. Then get dressed, go to work. Repeat that."

The slave repeated it, eyes wide, fixed on Young's face. He nodded, satisfied. "Okay, just remember. Door's closed but I can see through the window. If you're not on your feet, I'll freshen those marks on your ass." He slapped the slave there again for emphasis. "Stay on your feet, and there'll be no more trouble." _Not for you, anyway._

Naked, the slave should be just cold enough to help him keep awake: and he was in the office where he was supposed to be. Who cared whether he looked at books or not? Young supposed he had been meant to ring Doctor Cuddy at her home and ask her about the slave there had been the dirty rumors about. Practical jokes made Young tired, and using a slave for a practical joke just struck him as borderline cruelty.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

**_2. Supervisor_**

Brenda's voice was flat and urgent. "Lisa, you had the dog-and-pony show planned for two, didn't you?"

"Yes," Cuddy answered, with a sinking feeling.

"Someone doped Greg last night. I shut him into an exam room for now and I'll check on him again at ten, but he was pretty much completely out of it at five to eight - he walked in here but I'm not sure _how_."

"Are you sure he was doped?"

Cuddy realized the question had been a mistake when she heard Brenda snort at the other end. "We're running the clinic with just one doctor this morning and I don't have time for this." She put the phone down on Cuddy with a sharp click.

Mrs Foster was surprisingly matter-of-fact and cooperative: Greg had been given .25 milligrams of Triazolam at quarter past midnight, or most likely a little earlier, by the night shift security, because he had been loud and disruptive, disturbing the sleep of the other slaves in the dorm. The night security had followed standard procedure in administering the sedative - only if Greg were disruptive for more than three nights in close succession would disciplinary procedures come into effect.

"Greg was supposed to be working in the clinic this morning," Cuddy said. "Brenda Previn informed me just now that he wasn't able to do his work."

A pause. Mrs Foster sighed. "I'm sorry," she said. She sounded unexpectedly genuine, not sarcastic. "Greg should have been put to supervised hard labor this morning as soon as the alarm went, and he should have eaten his morning meal at his usual time and been worked hard afterwards. But his new schedule allows him to eat at any time until 9 in the morning, and to work unsupervised upstairs until he reports himself to Nurse Previn at eight. This creates a problem when he _needs_ supervision, and I should have raised that in our meeting yesterday, but this is the first time Greg has needed sedation at night. I can only say I'm sorry: Nurse Previn has a right to expect higher standards of work from one of our slaves."

Cuddy felt the wind taken out of her sails. She was further taken aback when Mrs Foster went on, "Can I suggest that if Greg needs sedation at night, he is put on supervised hard labor till it's time for him to report to the clinic?"

"Thank you," Cuddy said very sweetly, recovering herself. "Under no circumstances is anyone to give Greg _any_ drug unless approved by me." The thought of what could happen to her plans if Greg tried to take the medical license tests logy with a massive dose of sedative, or exhausted from several hours hard labor, gave her chills. He had to be clear-headed and rested tomorrow.

"Very well," Mrs Foster said, crisply: she no longer sounded apologetic. "Can I have that in writing? We do _not_ permit slaves to disrupt the dorms."

"I'll send you a memo," Cuddy agreed. She would enjoy writing it.

She called the clinic after ten and got Brenda, who sounded harassed. "Triazolam. Idiots. Oh well, it's short-acting. Greg's still in the exam room, I'll wake him at noon."

Cuddy looked up Triazolam: approved a few years ago, she supposed they used it in the dorms because it was fast-acting. Prolonged use caused daytime withdrawal symptoms and there were a bunch of hazardous side-effects that Cuddy did _not_ like the sound of, especially not memory loss. She wrote the memo, and made it stringent - no administration of drugs even in a medical emergency without a prescription, and except in a medical emergency, to contact Cuddy and get her permission first. Specifically, no night sedation.

If Greg had a bad dream or two, well, it was probably better for him to have the dreams than to be sedated out of them. Once he was working as a physician there would need to be some better system of access to him at night, and if he gave the other slaves in his dorm broken nights then that would be an additional reason to move him out of these locked dorms to somewhere accessible and where Greg could have a pager to notify him he was needed. There must be a storeroom or a cell in the basement that could be fitted up with a bed. Soundproofed if necessary.

At one o'clock, the clinic should be empty. Cuddy went down to the canteen to buy a couple of sandwiches. She found Greg tidying up one of the exam rooms, watched closely by Brenda.

"We could give him Phenytoin," Cuddy suggested. Greg still looked tired.

"No," Brenda said crisply. "He was given the drug over twelve hours ago. It's all out of his system by now, he doesn't need an antagonist, he just needs to wake up. Work, food, and coffee, that should do it."

"Apparently he didn't get breakfast," Cuddy said. She watched Greg moving round the room. He didn't appear to be suffering from muscle tremors or twitches. "Does he have any memory problems?"

"That's your department," Brenda said with grim humor. "Not that I noticed. He knew where he is, what his name was, who the President is. I'll keep pouring coffee into him."

Greg had frozen, wiping down the exam table; he was looking at them with wide blue eyes and was completely still. Cuddy frowned. She beckoned Brenda to the doorway where she was standing, and said to her quietly, "You know, he might not think to ask for a bathroom break. Make sure he has one before you bring him along to the lecture theater. I'm using the old one - you know, in the Morgan Bell wing."

"You want me to walk him over...?" Brenda looked at Cuddy, shrugged. "Okay. Just this once."

"Thanks," Cuddy said. "I'll get it set up." She handed Brenda the extra sandwich. "Give him this and get him there a few minutes before two."

She'd seen Greg House react brilliantly when under pressure and taken by surprise. It didn't matter this afternoon if he took a few minutes to get up to speed: tomorrow it could matter enormously. The dog-and-pony show for potential applicants to be Diagnostics fellow was as much to get the residents and fellowship doctors eligible to apply, used to the idea that they'd be working with and for a slave. Cuddy didn't doubt that they'd get enough applicants to have a respectable field of choice. But Greg_ had_ to pass the oral exam tomorrow, and this was the closest she could get to rehearsing him for that.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**3. Lecture**_

A quick headcount of the doctors filing into the lecture theater told Lilian that pretty much every remotely eligible resident and fellowship doctor had decided to show up for this ... performance? Job interview? It had been described as a presentation about a new fellowship (funded for only six months initially, with possible extension subject to the usual conditions) in a new speciality: Diagnostics.

Most of them, and Lilian Bailey counted herself in that, were not planning to apply for the Diagnostics fellowship. The real supervisor would be Doctor Cuddy; and everyone, whether they volunteered for the clinic or not, had heard about the slave she'd bought who'd be, sort of, the Diagnostics department... what?

Doctor Cuddy was standing by the projector. The slave was sitting at a chair at the back, half-hidden from most of the lecture theater by the old piano that had been left there for some past audiology lectures. Lilian deliberately picked a seat where she could stare unobtrusively at him.

He was wearing his rolltop and white labcoat. He sat very still, his hands at his sides, watching Doctor Cuddy. His face was grizzled with stubble, making it hard to guess his age: early thirties? He looked tired. He didn't look much different from how he'd acted sitting at the reception desk in the clinic, except that then his eyes had been on his work, and now - he was intent, very intent, on the woman who'd bought him - speculative gossip said for highly non-medical purposes. ("Playing doctor," Lilian thought, and snickered inwardly.)

Cuddy began by thanking them all for taking the time to be there and reviewing, briefly, the criteria for applying, the method, and the deadlines. "You shouldn't even consider applying if you're thinking that this will just be a six-month break in your real studies. You should give me your resume only if you're inspired by this presentation to take part in a unique opportunity - the foundation of a new medical speciality."

There was a little silence, as if everyone was wondering if they should applaud and then deciding not to. Cuddy paused, and smiled briefly, coldly. "I imagine that by now all of you are aware that there will be something else uniquely different about the Diagnostics department, and therefore about this fellowship. Doctor Gregory House studied at Johns Hopkins and at Michigan. He holds a double-speciality - " Lilian slightly tuned Cuddy out. She was watching the slave. He was leaning forward, a little, like a dog waiting for his owner's whistle. Had Cuddy trained him to speak in public?

"A few months ago, Doctor House was enslaved for debt," Cuddy said. "Seeing a unique opportunity to acquire a priceless medical resource - " Lilian tuned her out again, wondering how many times Cuddy could say "unique" in one lecture. There was a sudden shocked inbreath all round the lecture theater, and Lilian found herself rewinding what she'd heard, trying to believe she'd really heard it.

"The successful applicant will not be permitted, under any circumstances, to behave as if Greg were anything other than 'Doctor House'. He will be your teacher and he will supervise your practice of medicine. You will address him respectfully and you will do as he tells you. If he is not satisfied that you are doing your utmost, or if he or anyone else reports you for inappropriate behavior, he will have the effective right to fire you - and he will also have considerable input into which one of you we hire."

Lilian stared at the slave. He was looking at Cuddy, his mouth fallen slightly open. Lilian could have sworn he was as surprised as the rest of them.

"If any of you are unhappy about working for a fellowship under those conditions, kindly leave now."

Lilian wouldn't have dreamt of leaving. She was fascinated to see which of the other doctors got up - the obnoxious Jenkins sort of half got up, glanced around, saw no mass movement to the exit, and sat down again. A few others did the same sort of thing: there was a kind of stirring, but no mass exit. Everyone was too curious.

Cuddy glanced round the room with a kind of raised-eyebrow cold stare, and nodded. "Excellent." She glanced at her watch. "I have the lecture theater booked till four, but for various reasons I shall have to bring this to a close at quarter to. Doctor House's presentation should last no more than an hour, and he will then answer whatever relevant questions you may have until then. Doctor House, please come forward."

The slave froze. Then he stood up, awkwardly, and moved to the projector, glancing at Cuddy. She handed him two typescripts.

"The Diagnostic Department's form and function, and thoughts on Diagnostics as a speciality. Doctor House."

Then Cuddy walked to the door, and went out. The slave stood by the projector, clutching the typescripts, staring up at them all, looking - really - as if he'd rather be on his knees.

Jenkins laughed, a loud silly giggle. The slave's eyes snapped in his direction. He put down the typescripts beside the projector, and said, quite quietly but very distinctly, "What are you doing here?"

The slave waited. There was no reply. He repeated, more slowly, still staring at Jenkins, "What - are - you - doing - here?"

There was a pause. Jenkins said, aggressively, "You talking to me - Doctor House?"

"Applications for Diagnostics fellowships are open only to those who've completed their term of residency," the slave said. "You are just barely not an intern. You won't be eligible to apply for a fellowship for another ten months." Jenkins was silent: squinting at the slave with a look of astonishment. The slave raised his voice. "And even if you are eligible, I wouldn't have you: not because you're lazy, not because you're rude, and not because you're a hog." There was a brief, unbelieving titter.

"Of course you're all of the above, but that's no reason not to hire you, so long as you buy your own donuts. Because you were stupid enough to waste your time coming along to a job opportunity that you weren't qualified to apply for. You can waste your own time as much as you like, but I'm not interested in having someone working for me who'll waste _my_ time. Get out."

Jenkins didn't move. He sat there and stared at the doctor with an expression of utter disbelief, as if a chair had bit his ass when he sat down on it. After a moment, obviously deciding to ignore the snickers from the other doctors, he settled himself back in the seat, and said "Okay, let's hear what else you've got to say, 'Doctor House'."

"**_Get out!_**" The slave's shout was like a blow: Lilian realised, looking along the row, that she wasn't the only one who flinched. The slave - Doctor House - stood glaring at Jenkins, and after a long moment, Jenkins looked from side to side, apparently seeking sympathy or support. Getting none, he got up, and made a slow way across the room, past the projector, spilling the typescript papers over the floor. He paused, apparently waiting for the slave to pick them up, but the slave only said, again, much lower, "Get out," and Jenkins went.

The slave glanced down at the papers on the floor, then looked up at the lecture theater. He did not kneel to collect the sheets. He said, in a more normal voice, "The first principle of Diagnostics: everybody lies."

After a while, Lilian stopped thinking about him as 'the slave', and stopped thinking that this was a _tour de force_ performance from a chattel: she was engrossed. Her own speciality was orthopedics, where it wasn't usually a problem to establish _what_ was wrong, just to decide how to repair it: the best orthopedic surgeons considered the holistic approach of a patient's whole body, not just the specific bone. This was almost the same idea, applied to cases where no one properly understood what had happened - a game of detection, she thought, just as Doctor House said "But this isn't a detective story. Sometimes there's no villain. There might just be - " and he was off again.

At precisely an hour after Cuddy had left the room (okay, Lilian hadn't been timing it, but she could see him glancing at the clock and speeding up his delivery a little) Doctor House said "That concludes the presentation. Does anyone have any questions?"

"How much did you cost?" one of the doctors asked. Doctor Campbell. He was in oncology.

"Does anyone have any questions relevant to the Diagnostics fellowship?"

"I consider that to be highly relevant," Doctor Campbell said. "The more the hospital's got invested in you, the less likely they are to just give up this experiment and sell you at the end of six months. How much did you cost?"

"You'll have to ask my supervisor, Doctor Cuddy," Doctor House said, after a moment. "Yes?"

Doctor Bergeron had raised his hand. "If a patient has a cough and has been on a crash diet in the past six months for her wedding, would you send her for an X-ray and tell her she had lung cancer?"

"I wouldn't tell _her_ she had lung cancer till the X-ray came back and confirmed it," Doctor House said. "Though I'd probably tell the doctor who dismissed her cough as seasonal bronchitis and her sudden weight loss as the result of a crash diet that she had lung cancer, to make sure he did send her for an X-ray. But as it happens, I was wrong. It does happen. She didn't have lung cancer, she had a benign calcified lung node."

"What?" Bergeron sounded astonished and angry.

"I was wrong," Doctor House said. "But so were you." He outlined the case professionally, explaining that he'd noticed a slight difference between this patient's coughing and that of the other patients who did have bronchitis. "Never assume any detail is irrelevant. Most of them _will_ be irrelevant, but never assume."

Lilian asked a question - about what speciality Doctor House felt would be more appropriate to Diagnostics than others - and got a shrug: "I have no idea. I've never done this before."

"Then how do you suppose you'll be able to have any input into who to hire?" Lilian followed up, genuinely interested. "You could just throw the resumes on the floor and pick three." She glanced at the spilled papers on the floor - Doctor House had never bent to pick them up - and as she lifted her eyes she saw that House had looked down at them too, and back up at her.

"Good plan," House said, almost sarcastically. "Maybe I'll do that."

"Really?" someone said from further back, sounding shocked. Evidently without an irony-meter. "Why would Doctor Cuddy talk about asking for your input, if you don't have any?"

"Because I cost a lot of money," Doctor House said, after a long moment. He grinned, showing most of his teeth. "And let's face it, when you buy an expensive piece of equipment, you really just want to use it, don't you?"

The door opened. Doctor Cuddy walked in. She looked up at the clock. "I have to call this to a close," she said. "Thank you all for attending, I hope you found this interesting. If you wish to apply, your resumes are to be handed into my office for 5pm Thursday."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

**_4. Exercise_**

The new boy, Greg, showed up at four. Matt had been half-expecting him all day, and had just about written him off by the time he did show: a memo was composed in his head, to Doris Foster, saying something about how on the very first day Greg was permitted to set his own schedule, he'd just skipped exercise completely.

The boy was carrying a rolltop and white coat, and wearing smart clothes underneath. He went to the bench and began to strip off, quick and obedient but without so much as a word to his supervisor.

"Don't you have something to say to me, boy?" Matt asked.

"No, Mr Johnson," the slave said, giving him a quick look. "It's just gone four, I have an hour for exercise."

"You're late. I like to be finished with clean-up well before five." Matt smacked the slave's ass for emphasis. "Don't talk back to me, boy. Get out there and do laps." A good runner could go round the exercise field twenty-five times in an hour. "Twenty-five circuits before you get to shower. If you're not finished by the time I'm ready to go home, I'll see you smart for it." Hell, Mrs Foster had_ never_ had rules about supervisors giving slaves a smack on the ass.

He'd already picked out one of the slaves to screw, a good solid worker, one he hadn't had in a while. Jon washed off the hurdles and put the other equipment away and knelt down over the bench. Matt went to the window and looked out at the other slave, still lunging round the field, mud-splattered, running himself to exhaustion.

"You get back to your work," Mr Johnson told the boy. Jon got up and went under the showers, moving with an unflattering alacrity: Matt glanced down at himself, thinking as he rarely thought, about the slight paunch now he wasn't exercising as much, and the grey in his hair. Jon washed, dried off, dressed, and went out, too briskly obedient for a reasonable man to take offense: Jon always did what he was told.

He'd lost track of exactly how many circuits the slave had done, but just before five, the slave came staggering in, mired with mud and stinking of clean dirt and sweat.

Mr Johnson stopped him, made him stand just outside, and ran the cold water hose over him. He turned Greg under the blast of cold water, grinning to see him shiver. When he cut it off, the slave looked smaller, standing humbly.

"Good slaves get hot water," Mr Johnson said. "You want to be a good slave, right?" He directed Greg inside, smacked his ass again hard - _damn_ this Doctor Cuddy, what right did she have to make rules about how he could or couldn't get slaves to work hard at their exercise? He should be able to cane Greg for being lazy, just like any other slave. "On your knees, over the bench." He reached for his usual lube, half-squeezed, opening up his pants.

The slave hadn't moved. Mr Johnson put down the lube and moved towards him, clenching his fists. "Did you hear me, boy? _Over the bench._"

Mrs Foster's rules about not "upsetting" the slaves were going out of his head. He'd fucked Greg before, and the slave had enjoyed it. He was going to fuck Greg again, and he didn't care if Greg enjoyed it or not.

"I don't have to," Greg said, and bent to pick up his clothes. Mr Johnson kicked him in the face.

He hadn't planned to do that, but he had seen in his mind Greg picking up the bundle of clothes and walking out, as briskly as Jon had walked, into the basement, leaving Mr Johnson either to accept defeat or chase after a slave in some kind of undignified way as if he were a horndog chasing ass, not a supervisor taking his rightful due - and his foot had gone out and the slave had gone over, howling.

The beating administered was relatively light. The slave made no attempt to hit back, hardly any attempt to struggle. If he had, Matt had to admit, it would have gone on longer. He came to his senses, seeing Greg lying in a puddle of blood, blood leaking from his mouth, and stood up. He glanced at his watch. Unbelievably, it was barely five after five: Mrs Foster was probably still in her office. He had to go admit to her what he'd done.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

**_5. Overseer_**

Doris Foster sent Matt Johnson home. She warned him, regretfully, that this kind of damage to expensive hospital property could very likely lead to dismissal. "You'd better take tomorrow off, I'll get Nelson to cover for you. We'll call it a sick day. I'll call you tomorrow and let you know what the situation is."

Before she sent Matt home, she called ER and asked them to send a gurney down and an intern to assess the damage. And after she had that difficult conversation with Matt Johnson, she braced herself and called Doctor Cuddy.

She'd known she would have to apologize - but she hadn't expected the level of vituperation Cuddy could stoop to. The only reason Doris was prepared to excuse that kind of language, was that the doctor was speaking in a thin, shocked voice clearly hardly aware of what she was saying.

"I'm coming downstairs," Doctor Cuddy said.

"If you like," Doris said. "But I've sent to ER for a doctor to have them assess Greg on the spot and decide how to treat him. He'll be going to either the slave treatment room in the ER or to the slave ward - " She heard the gurney going past her door, and the slave whining in pain. "Excuse me, Doctor Cuddy: I'll just find out." She put the phone down.

"Sure - it's pretty superficial, bruises and contusions. The worst thing is his mouth, I want to have his jaw X-rayed. What happened, someone kick him in the face?" The intern laughed, sounding tired, and went on down the hall.

Doris went back to the phone and relayed this to Doctor Cuddy.

"His _jaw_?" Cuddy sounded almost as appalled as if Doris had told her it was a serious injury. "What if he can't talk?"

"He'll be in Radiology getting X-rayed," Doris said. "Of course he'll be at the end of the line. So it might be another hour or two."

Cuddy put the phone down. Despite everything, Doris grinned to herself. She expected the slave Greg would get bumped up to the front of the line in another ten minutes, max, regardless of who that offended.

Before eight - Doris stayed at work to be sure, following up the treatment plan - Greg had been X-rayed, diagnosed with a broken tooth, and the remains of the tooth extracted. Everything else was superficial and would heal with time: there were no cuts that even needed stitching. Doris listed him for the soft meal in the morning, which needed no chewing, and contacted Doctor Cuddy again for specific permission to let the slave have Tylenol before he went to the dorm and again in the morning.

It was of course a truly unpleasant incident - if Matt hadn't recovered himself in time, the damage done to a very expensive slave could have been permanent. Regardless of the cost of a slave, _her_ staff were meant to keep the slaves in good health and fitness: this kind of thing just wasn't meant to happen. Doris hoped Matt could come up with a satisfactory explanation, and be moved on to another post at the hospital: she would hate to see a good man lose his job over a momentary fit of temper. He couldn't work in his previous role again, and that was a pity: it had been a job uniquely suited to him.

But just the same, as she packed up and made ready to go home, at last, Doris couldn't help thinking that this _was_ the kind of thing that could happen if a slave was given such unprecedented license. Favoritism ruined slaves. Pity it had had to damage a good man's job, too.

_tba_

_Tailkinker will post Greg's Day tomorrow.  
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	14. Day 13

_There are slaves. Greg House is one of them. This is a sequel to Seven Stages and a prequel to Collar Redux. Dubcon. Noncon. Horrible Things Happen To House. Donuts.  
><em>

_This chapter has a specific spoilerific warning, which you will find at the end._

**Day Thirteen (Wednesday)**

**_1. Administration_**

There were things going on at work that Olivia didn't talk about at home. Her wife wasn't an only child.

It was lawful for a slave to practice medicine. Olivia Davis had had to look that up, when Doctor Cuddy had first contacted her to inquire. Owners were banned from re-activating a slave's medical license in only 9 states, and New Jersey was not one of them. The state Board of Medical Examiners even allowed that an enslaved doctor could treat free people in New Jersey, providing the slave passed written and oral examinations proving them fit to practise.

Jean had moved three thousand miles to go to college, and didn't go back for the holidays. She and Jean had lived together for five years before Jean admitted why: she'd had a brother. Somewhere, he was probably still alive.

The slave that the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital had bought had been licensed in Michigan. The blurred copies of his original documentation that had arrived at Trenton had crossmarks scribbled on them and a notary stamp - Davis looked at it in bemusement for a while and then figured out it must be the date of the doctor's enslavement. They must not have had a stamp specifically for enslaved doctors at the Michigan Board of Medicine: Davis found that curiously reassuring.

Everyone knew that people who were shiftless, who got into debt over their heads, were enslaved. They could be freed if they earned enough for their owners to repay their debt. Everyone knew that parents in financial trouble had the legal right to sell their dependent children. Jean's brother was two years older than her, a bright kid, played for his local Little League: he'd been worth more than her. Jean's parents had paid off their debts by selling him, got clean out of the financial tangle of debt and borrowing that had plagued them for as long as Jean could remember. Jean had gone to college and had never gone back to visit them.

Davis had a brief meeting with her supervisor. The Board had to allow the slave to sit the tests, but Davis should make all the tests as tough as possible. The state of New Jersey hadn't licensed a slave to work in a hospital for free people since the 1940s. "And if he passes, we don't want any talk about it. We don't want any other hospitals thinking that instead of having to hire doctors they can just buy them."

There was a standard multiple choice test which Davis couldn't do anything to change - a hundred and twenty questions, do as many as you can in an hour, the pass mark was 70%, all printed on the form.

Olivia had a curious thought: Jean could probably have done a hack, made the copy the computer would generate just that bit more difficult, if Olivia was allowed to tell her about it. By the time a doctor left medical school, they'd accumulated a huge load of debt: doctors who went on to do fellowships accumulated even more debt. But they weren't at risk of slavery providing they graduated, because debt collection agencies saw no benefit in attaching them for sale when they could get their money back from a doctor's high earnings. But if there was a market for doctors? Jean said, no matter what "everybody knows", slave attachment and sale was driven by the market demands.

There was a written test. Two hours to complete four out of six questions, minimum pass 70%. This one was more adaptable. Add two more questions, say the slave had to answer five and get 80%. Davis considered the order: usually the multiple choice was completed first, giving the applicant confidence for the second paper, but Doctor Cuddy _had_ emphasised she would appreciate speed in decision-making: the written test would take longer to grade.

Jean didn't talk about her brother. But she'd always said she didn't want kids. Not adopted, not their own.

The oral test. That was a pass / fail. Maximum of two hours, panel of three doctors: Davis contacted Doctor Martin at the NJCTH, explained the anomalous situation, and asked him to bring along a couple of discreet colleagues - nephrology and infectious diseases, she told him, but discretion was more important than expertise. Martin had a voice that could cut steel.

Doctor Cuddy would bring the slave to Trenton for a 10am start. They'd be done by four. The written test could be graded by five: she should be home at her usual time.

Olivia picked up the old medical license, scratched out and stamped over, and looked at it thoughtfully. She was sorry, on one level, for the slave who had been a doctor. But it would be wrong on all levels for hospitals to buy their medical staff: she was pretty sure Jean would agree if Olivia could ask her.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

**_2. Security_**

Charlie Edwards wouldn't have minded being told to transport a slave to Trenton. Especially not when the job involved hanging about in Trenton till the slave was done with being tested. He couldn't have a drink, but all he was going to have to do all day was wait in the car nearby in case the tests were over early or the slave caused trouble. But an administrator who'd recently given him some shit was travelling with the slave, and though she probably didn't know him by sight - hell, she probably didn't know him by _name_, administration never remembered your name - Charlie would just as soon have nothing to do with her.

"Sorry, Edwards," Mr Talbot said, not sounding real sorry. "I was told to send the biggest toughest guy we have and warn him to handle the slave with kid gloves. So you've been warned, okay? Don't give me any shit over this, it looks like a bad day for me already. You'll take shackles with you in case you need them, your judgement call, but do not bring him back with any broken bones or any bleeding. He got beat up yesterday, so he should be pretty docile."

The slave was the boy who just sat on the floor and looked at books all day. He'd been hit in the face pretty hard, even harder than that stupid bitch Hayes had hit him. Instead of decent working clothes, he was dressed up fancy, wearing nice pants and a matching jacket and a rolltop. The rolltop hid his collar. Charlie looked at him, disgusted. He didn't expect with an outfit like that, Doctor Cuddy would be putting him in the trunk, where a slave belonged: even though the slave was just secured by a pair of handcuffs.

"I can get to Trenton, Doctor Cuddy, but you'll have to tell me where to go once we're there," he told her. "Where do you want the slave to ride? We can fasten him down more securely in the trunk."

"He can ride in the back," Doctor Cuddy said. "Get in, Greg."

Charlie leaned in to strap the seatbelt firmly around the slave. These were fastenings for free people, though Charlie deliberately cinched the belt remindingly tight. "You unfasten this, boy, and I _will_ put you in the trunk, clear?"

The slave nodded, once. Charlie pulled himself out of the car and came face to face with Doctor Cuddy, looking up at him, with a kind of stern expression that reminded Charlie of Mr Turner. Charlie grinned, making himself look deferential. "Sorry, Doctor Cuddy, but I was told my job's on the line if I don't get him safe there and back again."

Doctor Cuddy nodded, and got into the passenger seat. She glanced over her shoulder at Greg. "Mind what the gentleman says, Greg."

It was a quick trip to Trenton once the car got on to US-1. Doctor Cuddy gave directions: they were going to one of the state government buildings facing Mill Hill Park. Charlie had figured he'd take the car to somewhere cool where he could sit on a comfortable chair and smell the beer (no, he wouldn't drink one) and watch a game, but Doctor Cuddy, cool as you like, pointed at the parking lot right by the building. "I'm sorry to waste your day like this, Edwards, but I'm required to have hospital security immediately by the building, so stay close. Please don't enter the building unless I call for you, and don't leave the car unless you must."

"All day?" Charlie stared dubiously at the parking lot. The hospital's vehicle was nicer than his, but he didn't want to spend six or seven hours in it. A moment later, he realized that Doctor Cuddy _did_ know his name.

"_All_ day," Doctor Cuddy said. "But we're due a lunch break at some point, so we'll want you then." She opened the rear door and leaned in to unsnap the seat belt. "Come, Greg. I hear there's a cafe in the building, and we have time for coffee before ten."

Charlie stood gaping after them as the slave walked up the steps beside her - the boy wasn't even on a leash - and realized, with gathering annoyance, that there wasn't anywhere in sight where _he_ could get a coffee, or even a bottle of water.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

**_3. Invigilator_**

The smallest room used for exams generally had twenty desks in it: all but one had been stacked to one side, and the single table left in the middle of the room. It was half past nine: Catherine Mason had already placed the first test paper on the desk face down with the first answer booklet: the exam instructions were face up. The second test paper was in a sealed envelope that she was not to open till noon. The Board were taking this hopeless attempt to acquire a medically-licensed slave very seriously: Mason intended to invigilate as fairly as usual.

At quarter of ten, the door opened: Mason got up from her chair and came to meet them at the door. She was startled for a moment; neither the tall man, though heavily bruised about the face, nor the pretty woman, wearing an outfit too revealing to conceal a collar, was her idea of a slave. But the instructions had said the slave was male, so she looked at the woman. "Doctor Cuddy?"

"Yes," the woman said.

"I'm Catherine Mason: I'll be invigilating your slave's examination this morning. We will begin sharp at ten. You will not be allowed to enter the exam room. Your slave must leave his jacket and rolltop with you or at the side of the room. He may take with him to the desk a clear bottle of water, at least one HB pencil, and a sufficient supply of pens with black or dark blue ink."

"His jacket, of course, but his rolltop - " Doctor Cuddy began.

"I cannot see why the slave needs to wear it. Everyone who will deal with him today is well aware of his status." Mason added, glancing at the clock, "If you need to take the slave to the bathroom, I advise you do so now, as there's no time allowed between the first and second written papers."

"Fine. We'll be back in five," Cuddy said sharply.

The slave took off his jacket and rolltop and set them down, neatly folded, on a stack of desks. He came back to the door to collect a handful of pens and pencils from the doctor, and a small bottle of water. He walked over to the desk in the middle of the floor and put down the items on the desk: his dark collar seemed to cut his head from his neck as he stood for a moment looking round the room. Then he sat down at the desk, folded his hands on the table in front of him, and looked at Mason. It was five of ten.

"Take a minute or two to familiarize yourself with the exam instructions," Mason said. She got up and walked down the room. The slave was looking directly ahead: his gaze hadn't dropped to the papers. "No matter how well you think you know procedure."

She walked back up to her chair again. It was odd invigilating in a nearly-empty room. The slave's ID number had already been written on his exam papers. "When I say 'Begin', you will have two hours to complete your first paper. I will take away your answer booklets and the question paper before I give you your second paper." She waited, looking at the clock, comparing it with her watch: "Begin."

The slave turned the paper over. He bent his head and started to look through it, turning the pages quickly. He closed it with a snap, and picked up one of the pens from the pile on the desk, opening the answer booklet. His face was hard to read past all the bruising, but Mason thought she saw him smile.

She announced the time at 11, and a few minutes later the slave raised his hand to ask for a fresh answer booklet; he had filled the one he had been given. Mason leafed through it quickly to check - his handwriting was quite clear, for a doctor - and gave him the spare. She warned him at quarter of noon, but by that time he was leafing back and forth between the two answer booklets, clearly adding and clarifying to his completed questions. At noon precisely by the exam room clock, she opened the envelope with the second paper, and walked down the room to take away the first paper and the answer booklets, and to hand him the second multiple-choice paper.

According to instructions, she put the answer booklets and question paper in another envelope, sealed it, and put it on her own table. The slave's head was down over his desk and his pencil was moving as fast as if he were marking the paper rather than answering it: she wasn't sure he noticed when Olivia Davis tiptoed in, closing the door quietly, and collected the envelope.

At ten to one, the slave lifted his head, put his pencil down, looked up at her, and said, "I'm finished."

"Candidates are reminded they may not speak in the examination hall," Mason said.

The slave shrugged, glancing round the room at the absence of other candidates. He sat back in his chair, folded his arms behind his head, and looked altogether too pleased with himself.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

**_4. Examiner_**

The Italian restaurant where they were having lunch before the oral was comfortable, not fancy, but the food was delicious: Doctor Evan Rabine hadn't been at Saint Francis for long, but he'd already been told that when Doctor Martin was the senior panel member for an oral exam at East Front Street, he'd usually invite his fellow panel members to lunch there (and the victim, if the oral had been scheduled for the morning). Don't suggest somewhere else and don't fight too hard for your share of the check, he'd been warned: you'll just offend him and he won't ask you to sit with him again.

Doctor Martin had introduced Rabine briefly to the other doctor - Gregor Asztalos, an infectious diseases consultant who worked at Robert Wood - but once the waiter had vanished with their order, he cleared his throat and delivered a nice little summary of their qualifications: he had a grating, harsh voice, but what he had to say was highly flattering.

"And there's one final qualification I believe you both share, gentlemen: I've been told by the Board that this exam is to be carried out with absolute discretion."

Rabine began to protest, but Martin shook his head. "I'm not talking about ordinary professional discretion - naturally you wouldn't discuss the details of a candidate's answers or your colleague's questions. I mean that this exam is something that neither the candidate nor the Board want talked about, whether we pass or fail. You may have noticed that the candidate's name wasn't listed on the invitation."

That had struck Rabine, but he had assumed it was something peculiar about New Jersey state law. Asztalos nodded, though, with a frown. "He works for Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, but he wasn't named. Who is he?"

"Two things," Doctor Martin said. "He is not employed there, he is their property: and in law he has no name, because he is a slave. The hospital is listed because the hospital is technically the 'candidate' we are examining, or at least an item of their equipment."

The waiter came back with their starters, but Rabine hardly tasted his soup. Doctor Martin was looking at him. "You have a difficulty with this, Evan?"

Rabine swallowed. The events of the past spring flowed past him. "I do, yes. You're saying the hospital bought a slave who used to be a doctor, and now they plan to put him to work like - " he shrugged, unable to find a word.

"If he has passed the written tests he sat this morning, and if he passes the oral examination we will subject him to this afternoon, the Board has no choice but to re-activate his license to treat patients. Pass or fail, the hospital doesn't want it known one of their doctors is chattel property: and certainly if he passes, the Board has no wish to have it known. So I must have your word, each of you, that nothing about this will come out from either of you."

"Certainly not," Asztalos said, sharply. "Doctor Martin, I think you might have warned me - warned _us_ - in advance."

"This is your warning," Doctor Martin said simply. "It will be inconvenient to me and to the Board if you decide you prefer not to examine a slave's medical knowledge, but I won't hold it against you."

Asztalos looked down at his soup. He spooned some more of it up. He said nothing.

"Is this even fair?" Rabine said. Slaves were mostly silent, hard-working creatures, in his experience of them. Addressed directly they went to their knees and didn't look you in the eye. "How is he expected to be _able_ to answer our questions?"

"That's not our problem," Doctor Martin said. "His owner has paid the fee to have him examined: I will give him permission to speak to any of us directly during the exam: he will kneel and address us respectfully, but to avoid confusion, he may use our names."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

**_5. Supervisor_**

Walking in on Greg in the Diagnostics office on Monday to find him correcting the textbook she'd set him to revise from, sitting on the floor because a stupid security guard had told him not to use the furniture, now seemed to Cuddy to be one of the defining moments of this endeavor. He really was, or would be, the perfect medical resource: and her hospital owned him. No other administrator had wanted to be associated with her in this project: they might scramble to catch up once it was clear how much of a success it would be, but too late.

Greg was the doctor he'd always been. He just had a set of nervous mannerisms, imposed over the top, which he had to learn to set aside when he was actually working.

The one thing the slave trainers had instilled which Cuddy planned to keep intact: his docility and politeness. Greg House had been a rude SOB. It was kind of nice to have him walking up the steps beside her, silent until she spoke to him, visibly appreciative (even if all he said was a murmured "Thank you, ma'am") of being allowed to sit down at the cafe table and have coffee and a late breakfast. Cuddy ordered a black coffee and a blueberry muffin for herself, and glanced at Greg, willing to let him express a preference, but his eyes were on the table and she shrugged and ordered the same for him.

"You're here to complete some tests to get your medical license reactivated," Cuddy said, and Greg's head jerked up sharply. He looked at her across the table, his eyes wide, blue in the heavily bruised face.

"When did you last have painkillers?" Cuddy asked.

"After I got up," Greg said. "About..." he frowned. "Quarter past four, I guess."

"Goodness, this must be the middle of the day for you," Cuddy said, sympathetically. "I have some instructions for you."

Greg nodded. He said nothing.

"From now on, until you get into the car to go home, you may not call anyone - including me - ma'am or sir. Don't kneel, don't be slavish - you know what I mean. You're here as a medical professional, taking standard tests for a re-instatement of your license. There's a written exam in the morning which may be followed by an oral exam in the afternoon." Which definitely _would_ be - the Board had made that clear, damn them - but there was no need to tell Greg that now. "You'll take the written tests, you'll pass them easily - we'll go have lunch somewhere nice, and unless you have to take the oral as well, we'll go home. Your license should be re-activated by Friday."

Greg stared at her. He still said nothing.

The waitress came back with their coffees and the muffins. Greg looked at his plate.

Cuddy smiled at him, keeping impatience tightly reined in. "Do you understand me, Greg? You don't have to ask me for permission to drink the coffee, or eat the muffin - " Brenda had told her about Greg's little meltdown in the clinic over a sandwich and a cup of coffee " - you can just act like a normal person, until we have to go home."

Greg glanced up at the breakfast menu. He cleared his throat. "Could I have something else to eat?"

"Of course," Cuddy said, surprised. She made her voice more sympathetic again. "Of course, Greg. What do you want?"

"A three-egg cheese omelette, hold the toast, and orange juice," Greg said. He reached out for the sugar bowl, put two spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee, and stared at her.

After a moment, Cuddy signalled the waitress. She found she was grinning as she relayed the order, and to her surprise, though Greg wasn't exactly smiling, she thought he looked amused, too.

Greg ate the omelette fast, even though he was clearly being careful of the bruised side of his mouth: Cuddy gave him two Tylenol and he swallowed them with his orange juice. It was just after nine-thirty.

"We need to go find the exam room," Cuddy told him. "You start at ten, finish at one. I'll be close by - " She'd brought work to do through the day " - and we'll go for lunch at one."

Once Greg had been safely deposited in the exam hall with the invigilator for the first half of his tests, Cuddy felt she could relax. The oral exam was going to be nervewracking - she'd asked if they'd allow her to audit, the Board had refused - but she'd done and would do her best to build Greg up for that, and he _could_ do it - she'd noticed even when he was acting most "slavish" he could answer accurately and confidently if he was asked strictly medical questions. Doctor Martin had a reputation as a dragon.

There was a good Italian restaurant close to the state office complex, and Cuddy had chosen that and asked specifically for a table in the back room. The bathrooms were between the back and front halves of the restaurant, and Cuddy could see the men's room door, just, from where she was sitting: Greg excused himself to go to the bathroom almost as soon as they sat down, but Edwards was outside and Greg knew it. She was taking these almost-paranoid precautions because, for the first time since she'd bought him, Greg was in a public place where no one except herself knew he was a slave, and he was not wearing cuffs or shackles.

She hadn't asked permission for this. She could justify it in retrospect if Greg - _when_ Greg aced the oral exam - but if Greg somehow succeeded in running away - Cuddy sat with her gaze ostensibly fixed on the menu, looking over it at the men's room door. But in a reasonable amount of time, Greg was back out, looking surprisingly cheerful and confident, and asking her a normal question about what's good here.

They both had the soup, and Greg ordered a tortelli di zucca - pasta stuffed with squash: he'd asked if he could have risotto, but Cuddy had to tell him they didn't have the time. "You will have to go back for an oral exam," she told him. She couldn't even remember what she'd ordered, a stab at the menu, but the look on his face was offputting - completely expressionless.

"I passed the written," he said after a long moment. "I know I did."

"When I applied for your license to be re-activated," Cuddy told him, "the Board elected to require you to take both the written exams and an oral exam. The oral is scheduled for two, we'll need to be back in good time. It's just one more step and then you're home free - you can work as a doctor again."

Greg's eyes widened, but he said nothing. His face looked closed. After a moment, he began to look round the room, away from her, anywhere but at her. He ate his soup, ignoring the breadsticks, and looked down into his plate until the pasta arrived.

"Greg," Cuddy said.

He looked at her. For a moment his mouth opened, but he closed it again. He put his hand up to touch his roll-top, a gesture that momentarily puzzled Cuddy until she realized he was touching his collar through the cloth.

"I know you can ace this - all you have to do is not let them rattle you. Head up, speak back, don't be rude - just answer their questions. Your pasta's getting cold."

She ate her own and after a minute or two Greg followed suit. Cuddy handed him two more Tylenol and he took them. He still didn't say anything.

"They will be trying to fail you," Cuddy admitted to him. "They wouldn't allow me to audit the exam. Keep track of what they ask you. If there's any inappropriate questions, we may be able to challenge a fail. They won't have any excuse to fail you on medical grounds - you are the best. You're_ better_ than all three of the doctors examining you." You're a medical genius, she thought of adding, and thought it was too much, and said it anyway.

Greg still said nothing. It was nearly time to go. Cuddy summoned the waiter, paid the bill, left a bigger tip than usual - she was _rattled_ - and got up to leave, nodding Greg to follow.

They had time to let Edwards pause the car by a convenience store and go in to buy himself some lunch. The few minutes they were alone in the car together, Cuddy could see in the mirror that Greg sat still, his hands by his sides.

"You have no reason to be afraid of this," Cuddy told him fiercely, spontaneously. "You're Gregory House, you can _ace_ this."

Edwards came back to the car just then, but Cuddy was sure Greg wouldn't have spoken anyway. They were almost at the exam hall, when he did finally say something, not looking at her. "If I pass, do I get a cookie?"

Cuddy almost laughed, she was so relieved. "All the cookies you want," she promised, thinking she might actually stop and buy him a box on his way home - Mrs Foster would doubtless regard this as an unjustifiable overload of treats, but if Greg did as well in the oral as she expected, he'd deserve it.

"Yeah," Greg said. He still didn't sound happy, but he had made a kind of joke. He went into the exam hall, and the door closed behind him.

Cuddy sat down on the nearest hall couch, paperwork beside her. There was a lot to to be done setting up a new department, and most of the work that would have fallen to a department head was coming to her. Plus there was a fair amount of paperwork just to do with being the supervisor for a slave, especially a slave with a non-standard routine: even the SBC form exempting Greg from collections had taken some thought. He was a rare blood type, Cuddy didn't want to refuse outright, but Greg should not be dragged away from his real work to give blood: she consented to the usual Sunday collections if she were notified two days in advance, and wrote as strongly as possible that she _must_ be informed before any emergency collection was taken.

About three o'clock, someone's assistant appeared, asking if she was Doctor Cuddy and could she come to the phone: there was a message from the Dean of PPTH. At least he also offered to make her coffee as she took the call: this was not good news.

Cuddy walked Greg out to the car at the end of the oral, handing him over to Edwards to be put back into the car in cuffs for the ride home. The phone call about the messy situation back at PPTH had driven all good humor out of her. She still had to wait for the results, but the panel didn't take long: they told her the slave had passed. The Board employee Cuddy had been in touch with over this, Olivia Davis, told her the results of the written exams would be faxed to PPTH by five.

Cuddy barely managed diplomatic thanks and words of appreciation all round: once back in the car, she told Edwards that they were to get back to PPTH as fast as possible. "It'll be rush hour by the time we get there," he warned her.

"Just get me there before five," Cuddy said grimly.

Mrs Foster had written a memo about Greg and sent it to the Dean of Medicine, who at PPTH was also the chief administrator. The Dean had read parts out to her over the phone. Every damn disagreement Foster had had with Cuddy, she'd turned to make it _Cuddy's_ fault - she even claimed the laceration on Greg's scalp at the Sunday morning cleaning was somehow Cuddy's fault, due to "supervision policies that had isolated Greg from other slaves". Greg, doubtless aware that Matt Johnson was no longer allowed to cane him, had made an intemperate remark of some kind to the exercise overseer, and the overseer had lost his temper and administered a beating. This was apparently also Cuddy's fault. Mrs Foster wanted Greg removed from Cuddy's supervision and treated like any other slave.

They were delayed by traffic, but the ride back still wasn't long enough. Cuddy gazed out of the window, took deep breaths, and tried to cool down. Anger wouldn't help. She'd told her secretary to wait by the fax machine and bring her the written test results as soon as they arrived.

The Dean's office was on the ground floor in the oldest part of the building - a handsome suite of rooms, with a lovely view over the campus, but isolated from the main part of the hospital. The secretary met them at the door of the office with the faxes, and Cuddy glanced down at them. Excellent.

The Dean was sitting behind his desk: Mrs Foster was in one of the visitor's chairs, looking quite comfortably determined. The other man, looking less comfortable perched in a visitor's chair, wearing a suit and tie as if he weren't used to them, was probably Matthew Johnson.

"Why did you bring the slave to this meeting?" the Dean said.

"To establish that we are all talking about the same person," Cuddy said, without turning a hair. She'd meant to have Greg _present_ at the meeting, but she certainly wasn't going to argue with the Dean over that. "I wouldn't want there to be any confusion - I have no idea how many slaves PPTH owns called 'Greg'."

"Well," the Dean said, glancing at Mrs Foster and the other man. "Can you confirm - ?"

"Of course," Mrs Foster said.

The other man barely grunted. Cuddy took hold of Greg's arm and tugged him forward so that his face was in the light: the massive bruise purpling around his jaw and towards his cheekbone distorted his features. "Are you sure?"

"Yes, that's him," the man said.

Cuddy nodded. The Dean had seen the bruising: that was the main thing. She nodded to Edwards. "Would you take Greg back to the Diagnostics office, and ensure he doesn't leave the office or speak to anyone?"

The security guard took Greg away. Cuddy put the faxed results down on the Dean's desk. "The Board have agreed to re-activate Greg's medical license, Doctor Alexander," she said.

The Dean looked at the fax and frowned, picking it up.

"He got 100% in the multiple choice test, pass mark is 70%: he got 89% in the written test, pass mark is 80%. The oral exam was conducted by Doctor Martin - " no further introduction needed, _everyone_ knew Andrew Martin " - with Doctor Rabine examining on nephrology and Doctor Asztalos on infectious diseases, which as you know are Doctor Gregory House's two board-certified specialities. They passed him after a two-hour exam followed by fifteen minutes in conclave. We will receive the notice that his license has been reactivated by Friday, and Greg can be set to work in the clinic on Saturday."

"Thank you, Doctor Cuddy," the Dean said. "Congratulations. Now can we discuss the purpose of this meeting?"

"I understood the purpose of this meeting to be an inquiry into why Matthew Johnson found it necessary to kick a very valuable slave in the face. If Johnson had broken Greg's jaw, we would have had to request a delay in his examination."

"Doctor Cuddy," Johnson said. He sounded genuinely apologetic. "I want you to know how very sorry I am I lost my temper like that. I got riled when your boy talked back to me, but I shouldn't have lashed out - there was no excuse for that. When I think of the kind of damage I could have done, the expense I could have put this hospital to - that I _did_ put the hospital to, Greg had to have an X-ray for his jaw - I don't have words for how sorry I am."

Cuddy stared at him. She was aware that the social atmosphere in the room expected her to say she accepted his apology.

"Johnson came directly to me and reported the incident as soon as it happened," Mrs Foster said. "I reprimanded him and told him to go home. I believe that he should be transferred to work in some other capacity: I don't want him to supervise slaves again."

The Dean folded his hands together on his desk. He had been a surgeon: he had very white clean hands now. "Thank you, Mrs Foster. Doctor Cuddy, what are your views?"

"Should we be discussing this in front of the employee concerned?" Cuddy said. She had every intention of getting Matthew Johnson out of PPTH as fast as lawfully possible, and threaten him with prosecution for wilful damage if he talked about why he'd been fired. "What exactly did Greg say to you that 'riled you up'?"

"He refused to do what he was told," Johnson said. "I always have a slave help with clean-up at the end of the day. Your boy told me he didn't have to do that."

Cuddy frowned at him. There was an edge to the words 'your boy' as Johnson said them, with implications she didn't like. "Your working day is ordinarily seven to five, isn't it? On Tuesday, the Diagnostics presentation was scheduled from two to four, but I ended the question period at quarter of four so that Greg would have the full hour he's required to have outdoors. I'm told you prefer to have the exercise sessions completed by four to allow time for administration and clean-up, correct?"

"Yes," Johnson said.

"Did Greg get his hour outside?"

"Sure, I set him to run laps round the field. He was done by five."

"The last scheduled exercise session is between three and four, isn't it?" Cuddy watched Johnson's face go red, and knew she'd hit paydirt. "Why hadn't you already told a slave from that session or another one to help you clean up? Why wait till five to _start_ cleaning up when your working day ends at five?"

Johnson's face was bright red. He shifted in his seat. He glanced desperately at the Dean, who sat back in his chair and looked impassive. Cuddy raised her eyebrows, glancing at Mrs Foster, who had an especially dry expression on her face.

"Look, I'm entitled," Johnson said. "He's not tagged, I don't do them in my work hours, I just take a break at the end of the day and... you know. I'd never do a tagged slave, but he's _not tagged_. And he likes it. I've done him before, I wouldn't keep doing it even to a fucking slave if it was upsetting him - "

"I think you may have said enough," the Dean said. "Please go, Mr Johnson. I feel sure the hospital will be in touch by the end of the week."

Johnson got up awkwardly and trailed out. Mrs Foster sighed and shook her head. "Matthew Johnson has worked for this hospital for nearly twenty years, Doctor Alexander."

"I appreciate that, Mrs Foster, but..." the Dean also sighed and gave a headshake. "Well. Moving away from this matter, to the more important issue of who supervises this - " he looked down at the fax again " - well, this slave."

"Brenda Previn will supervise him in the clinic, I'll supervise him in his work for Diagnostics - subject to Board approval, of course."

"My job is to oversee the welfare of every slave owned by this hospital," Mrs Foster said. "I can't ensure Greg's welfare on the haphazard and _unsupervised_ schedule that you seem to have in mind for him , Doctor Cuddy."

"It appears you can't ensure Greg's welfare in the _basement_," Cuddy said. "Last Sunday his scalp was lacerated, yesterday a tooth literally kicked out of his mouth, and on Monday night he was dosed with Triazolam so that he wasn't fit for work on Tuesday morning."

"And the previous Tuesday while you had left him by himself in an unsupervised office, he was slapped in the face repeatedly."

"By a maintenance worker who was using the place as a smoking-room, and who's been fired!"

"Ladies, please," the Dean intervened. He glanced at his watch. "I'm sure we all have homes to go to. Mrs Foster, I want to thank you for bringing this to my attention, and I assure you that it will be discussed by the Board at our meeting on Friday as part of the agenda. Doctor Cuddy, would you mind remaining here a moment?"

The Dean got up to escort Mrs Foster to the door. When he came back he wasn't smiling. "The Board's divided on this Diagnostics department idea, Lisa," he told her. "How the vote will go on Friday, I couldn't say. Doris Foster's concerns raise a valid issue: you want to give a slave we own an unheard-of autonomy, with consequent serious risks of vandalism and abuse. You need to be able to give a solid answer about how this will work - to show you've recognized and addressed these practical concerns."

Cuddy was driving home before she realized she had left Greg still in the upstairs office, either locked in or with Charlie Edwards possibly still guarding him. She was home with time to spare before eight, and rang the number assigned to the Diagnostics phone. She had to ring twice, but the second time a distant voice answered, stuttering a little. "Hello. Diagnostics office."

"Greg," Cuddy said. "Are you locked in?"

There was a silence. "No," Greg said, tonelessly. "The door's open. I'm not supposed to leave or speak to anyone."

Cuddy snorted. "It's nearly eight, of course you can go - were you planning to spend the night there? Get down to your dorm. I'll see you tomorrow at seven, my office."

Greg put the phone down. There had been no time to tell him anything about the meeting, but he couldn't be punished without her direct agreement, so really, the worst that would happen was she'd get a memo to say he'd missed his supper.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**6. Intern**_

Jenkins had been hanging around in the Diagnostics office since four. He was sitting at the other desk, hidden from the hall by a filing cabinet. The desk was brand new: Jenkins had opened and closed all the drawers a dozen times. The cabinet was empty. The Dunkin Donuts box was looking increasingly tempting - he wished now he'd bought an extra one.

By five, he'd decided to eat the apple crumb donut. Eleven or twelve donuts, it didn't really matter. He'd just finished and was licking his fingers clean and thinking that ten would look more symmetrical, when he heard two people coming up the hall towards this door - he stood up just as a security guard shoved the slave inside.

The slave landed on all fours and fell sideways - his hands were cuffed together, Jenkins saw, and he grinned, thinking this made his plans even better.

"Who are you and what are you doing in here?" the man asked him. He was a big guy, a lot taller than Jenkins, looked like he worked out.

"Doctor Jenkins. I'm, I have business here. With this - " he gestured at the slave.

The guard gave him a look of pure contempt. "You're the doc that's going to _work_ for this piece of crap?"

"No!" Jenkins reacted defensively. "No, I'd never take a job working for a _slave_, who would?"

"Yeah, right." The look of contempt dissolved, the guard nodded companionably. "Yeah, hard to understand anyone who'd do that. So, what are you doing in here?"

Jenkins picked up his camera and nodded at the box of donuts. "The slave talked back to me the other day. I wasn't able to discipline him at the time - " He'd picked that phrase up from his father, and thought it sounded well, " - but I thought I'd just show him his place, maybe take a few pics and show them round."

The guard looked at him. "What did you have in mind?"

"Well, I was going to make him eat all of those donuts," Jenkins explained. He hoped the guard wouldn't ask him why. No one had called him a hog to his face since the slave's outburst yesterday, but he'd heard one of the nurses grunt like a pig in the canteen, right behind him, and then giggle. "Figured I'd take a few shots of him down on all fours eating them up from the floor, taking them from my hand, crap like that."

There was a moment's silence. Slowly, the expression on the guard's face changed to a slow grin of amusement. "You're some kid, aren't you?" He looked at his watch. "It's after five," he declared. "I'm off duty. You want some help? Ever handled a slave yourself before?"

"Course," Jenkins said stoutly. "My father owns lots of slaves."

"Sure, but could you use a hand? Easier with two. One condition, though." He pointed at the camera. "Neither of our faces show up in your photos, got it?"

"Sure," Jenkins said, again.

The slave was pulling himself to his feet. He stood unsteadily, and lifted his chin. For a moment Jenkins actually quailed, expecting another shout from the slave, not sure how he'd react, but the guard hit the slave hard in the chest and knocked him down again. He landed on his butt on the carpet.

"Boy," the guard said, "I have two orders concerning you. You don't get to leave this room, and you don't get to speak to anyone. _Anyone_. You try and speak to either of us, boy, and your mouth is gagged. With whatever's convenient." He closed the door sharply, and turned to Jenkins. "I'm Charlie Edwards. Call me Charlie, doc."

"I'm Jenk to my friends," Jenkins said.

"Okay, Jenk, let's get this show on the road. We'll get his pants off first and then I'm going to take the cuffs off and hold him while you get those fancy clothes off his upper half. We want him butt naked for this, right?"

Jenkins felt his heart bump. The slave was staring at him with those bright blue eyes. He remembered patches of that speech the lady doctor had made, about how this slave was supposed to be such a terrific doctor, a genius. He swallowed. The hell. He was just a slave. "Right." He grinned. "We wouldn't want to get those nice clothes messed up, would we?"

"Good man," Charlie said.

The next few minutes were more energetic than Jenkins had expected, though Charlie did most of the work. It hadn't occurred to Jenkins that a man in handcuffs, held by two other men, could resist so hard when his clothes were being dragged off. Once he was naked and his hands were cuffed together again, Charlie shoved him to his knees while Jenkins was stacking the clothes up on the other desk. He opened the Dunkin Donuts box again. "You take the camera, Charlie," he said, picking up a chocolate-frosted donut. "Open wide, boy." He had to be very casual about it: the slave was a startling presence in the room, naked, not what Jenkins had expected.

The slave's mouth stayed shut. Jenkins shoved the donut against his lips, smearing them with chocolate. "Open up!" he said sharply.

"See, there's a knack to this," Charlie told him. He took the donut out of Jenkins' hand, so pleasantly that Jenkins hardly minded, and tapped the slave on the jaw. The slave's mouth dropped open, and Charlie shoved the donut inside. "There's a spot on the jaw they use in the slave training centers, to get the slaves to open their mouths for feeding or medication. Surprised you didn't know about it."

"I just didn't think of it," Jenkins said truthfully. The slave was munching on the donut, eyeing them, trying to get it down. Jenkins reached for his camera, saw his hands were sticky with chocolate.

"Wipe them on him," Charlie said. He nodded. "Go on." He put his hands on the slave's shoulders, deliberately smearing off the chocolate on his own fingers, finishing by wiping them through his hair. Jenkins grinned. He reached for another donut and tried that spot on the jaw - the slave's mouth dropped, just as it had with Charlie, and Jenkins laughed out loud. This was great. Charlie had picked up the camera and took a couple of shots with it.

"How many more of those have you got?" Charlie asked.

"Nine," Jenkins said.

The slave spat half the donut on to the carpet. Charlie slapped his backside, a loud resounding noise. "Get down and clean that up." He shoved the slave into position and spoke confidentially to Jenkins. "No offense, Jenks, but overkill - six we might get down him, but he'll vomit if we try and do all of them, unless we take all night, and we've only got till eight."

"Why till eight?"

"He's due back in his dorm then. In fact, we better be done well before then, he'll need to shower, too." He bent over the slave, face on the carpet, and delivered another resounding smack on his backside. Charlie had very big hands: Jenkins was conscious of the difference in size, but he lined up and delivered a smack too, pleased when the slave grunted and opened his mouth to take in one more piece of donut.

Charlie put his hand on Jenks' shoulder and squeezed him. "I got something else in mind for this boy. Something I promised him already if he caused me any more trouble. You up for it?"

Jenks glanced down. Charlie was palming his own groin: Jenks could see he was getting hard, tenting the front of his pants. Charlie caught his eye. "You up for it?" he repeated, with meaning. "I promised this boy I'd ream the crap out of him."

"Sure," Jenks said. He was tensely excited. He had never done anything like this before, fumbling adventures with slaves in his father's warehouse, but this kind of deliberate shared action felt like something new, like being accepted as a man by his new friend. He laughed again, and pointed at the donuts. "I guess we could give them to him from the_ other_ end."

Charlie laughed. "Sure, Jenks. You got any jelly donuts in that box? Break them open and shove them up his dirtbox, that'll lube the way for us."

Charlie went first. He went in and somehow it was louder and smellier than Jenkins had expected. He kept his own hard-on by rubbing himself: he was excited, sure, this was great, but it was messy. He took a few shots of Charlie mounted on the slave, one with the slave's face clearly showing, another where you could see the slave had got visibly excited.

"He's really enjoying it," Jenkins said in wonderment, surrendering his camera to Charlie and moving into position himself.

"They're just made for this," Charlie said. "You gotta wonder, some people want to treat them like they're human, but they're just fuckboxes and furniture." He laughed. Jenkins was too nervous to laugh, he was afraid he was going to go soft again and Charlie would see, but he got inside and the slave's backside was sticky and hot against him, and he was half aware of Charlie taking shots but mostly he just gripped on and shoved and shoved till he came.

It was after seven, Charlie said. Jenkins was feeling sort of vague. The office was a mess, he realised, not clean or neat at all. Charlie got the slave to pick up the bits of donut with his hands and pile them in the trash can, and use some wipes to clean up the splashes where the slave had come. The slave was moving awkwardly, as if it hurt him. The office looked tidier when they were done: Charlie said cleanup crew would handle the rest later, no problem.

Charlie picked up the trash can. "Okay, boy, you stay here, don't leave the office, don't talk to anyone." He nodded to Jenkins and they walked out together: Charlie dumped the remains in a garbage chute. He turned into the stairway. "Can I see your camera, Jenks?"

"Sure?" Jenkins handed it over. "Look, maybe we could go for a beer...?"

Charlie pulled the camera open, took out the film, and handed Jenkins the camera, before Jenkins could get an outraged "Hey!" out of his mouth.

"We had our fun, I'm not interested in going on the record, kid," Charlie said. "For what it's worth, tomorrow morning I'm giving my boss two weeks notice and I expect him to give me two weeks pay and tell me to get out. This place is going to shit."

He headed down the stairs, turning to look up at Jenkins. "And just a word of advice, kid - no matter how pleased you feel with yourself right now, you mention my name when you run your mouth off about this, and I'll find you and do to you what we just did to that boy. I will."

Jenkins shut his mouth, and nodded.

"If I were you, I wouldn't mention it at all. That boy got what he deserved, but he's Doctor Cuddy's personal toy and I do not think she'd want to know we shared."

Jenkins nodded again, looking back up the stairs: when he looked down, Charlie was gone. He'd lost his photos of last weekend, they were still on the roll that Charlie had taken. He walked down the stairs slowly, a slow and inexplicable feeling rolling over him that maybe, for more reasons than one, he had better not talk about what they'd done tonight. He'd thought it was going to be funny, that everyone was going to laugh at the pig slave eating donuts, but somehow, it hadn't been funny.

_tba_

_Sorry. That was grim. If you're still with me after all of this it would be great to let me know. Greg's Wednesday by Tailkinker will be posted tomorrow._

**Warning**: Greg is raped during this chapter, with deliberate intent to hurt and humiliate him.


	15. Day 14

_You're back with us, after that terrible Wednesday! Glad to see you again. Greg has been a slave at PPTH for only a fortnight, and really horrible things have happened to him, especially yesterday. This is an AU, there are slaves, Greg is one of them, dubcon, noncon, Horrible Things Happen To House. This is a sequel to Seven Stages in the Collar Redux, there is a parallel story from Greg's POV at Tailkinker's profile. If you are reading this use the word 'unicorn' in your review._**  
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**Day Fourteen (Thursday)**

**_1. Jon_**

The guard unlocked the door and Greg stumbled into the dorm: he looked bad enough that Jon wondered why the guards hadn't just kept him caged. Mr Johnson had beaten him on Tuesday, but there were other marks more recent than that: someone had done something with him last night, even before the cage.

Greg was almost certainly crazy, and that made him dangerous. Jon looked away, getting dressed as quick as he could. He saw out of the corner of his eye that Greg was managing to dress himself: ordinary work clothes today, not the fancy stuff he'd been wearing for the last few days. Jon wasn't looking, but he noticed when Greg fell into line behind him, followed him to the closet where the supervisor was passing out cleaning kits. Greg looked blankly as the supervisor laughed at him, but that was probably the right reaction.

The sanitation crew had regulars and drop-ins, most slaves who could manage the work had to do it at some time, and even slaves as skilled as The Peach cleaned where they worked. Jon supposed Greg was cleaning the tiny office where he sat and read.

The night sanitation crew had left a paper tab on the door of that office, meaning their schedule hadn't let them clean it, and when Jon opened the door he could see why: a couple of people had fucked a slave here. It was Greg's job to clean that room, but when Jon stepped into the bathroom Greg had been working in, he wasn't there. Jon stood a moment, staring round: Greg hadn't even finished cleaning it. He'd just run away.

What a slave should do when finding that another slave had disappeared from where they should be, was notify either their supervisor or the nearest security guard. Jon had never done that yet, but he was angry with Greg just the same, as he finished wiping down the surfaces that Greg had left undone and moved back to the office to start cleaning there. Greg had been in a mess when he came back to the basement, and from the look of the office he'd been cornered there by a couple of medical students out to play food games. Jon had been cornered once by half a dozen students who had said they needed to find out as an experiment how much Dream Whip a human stomach could hold: they'd fed him till he threw up, and then they'd untied him and got him to clean up their mess and his, and then at least one of them had fucked him.

Greg thought he was special. He'd got kicked in the face by Mr Johnson for thinking he was too special to get fucked.

Jon went on cleaning up the carpet. There were crumbs of stale cake worked into the fabric - donuts, maybe - and other stains that had to be got out by careful spot cleaning. He'd tell Mr Smith that the office carpet would need a special clean on Saturday. Greg could do that. If he was still here. If he went on having screaming nightmares every night till the guards took action, he probably wouldn't be.

Jon had never thought he was special. He'd been sold because he wasn't. He was nearly twentywhen his dad had run off and left them, him and his mom and the three younger kids, Jon tried not to remember any of their names any more. The younger kids were smart, they were doing real well in school. The law said his mom could sell them, but not Jon. He and his mom had talked about it, and Jon had said then (stupid kid, he thought now, stupid stupid kid) that he'd be a slave, he'd get sold, better him than his mom or the younger ones. He'd thought then being a slave would just mean working hard every day, all day, and what was that different from what he did already?

There were other surfaces that had to be cleaned, sticky handprints dried on, crumbs on the clean desks. There was a pile of books and three notepads on the desk, four pens - two of them nearly out of ink - and when Jon was done, all three of the notepads had blank pages missing, carefully torn out, and one of the pens was gone too. Jon tucked them under his t-shirt - they'd be found easily if someone did a pat-down search, but no one had any reason to, this time in the morning. The office smelled pretty fresh and clean, maybe a whiff in the background but nothing to notice: Greg was the only one who spent time in here.

Jon pulled the tab off the door to turn over to Mr Smith, to explain why he hadn't done the usual number of bathrooms, and only then wondered if he should have: if the only person who used the office was a slave, was this a Sunday morning cleaning job, even if it wasn't in the basement? But the office was right on the main hall of that floor, anyone walking by could see right into it, it must be meant to be cleaned daily. And if Greg was supposed to do it and got into trouble because Jon had the tab, well, that was Greg's look-out. He'd probably get caned.

There was time to do one more bathroom before breakfast: Jon was on his knees scrubbing out a urinal (a man came in, used the urinal next to it Jon had just cleaned, walked out again) when he thought: he could hand the tab over to Greg. Point out that Greg would get caned if _Jon_ had handed over the tab for cleaning the office Greg used. Maybe Greg would be more ready to listen. Probably (Jon almost hated himself for thinking this) he'd be really ready to listen to anyone, after a night in the cage: it was tough on anyone to be locked up in the cage, but it was really bad for someone right out of Processing.

He'd sound Greg out. If Greg sounded crazy, Jon would back off again. But maybe Greg had just been angry with Kev. Maybe he'd listen this time.

Jon didn't want to spend even one more night listening to Greg scream until the guards came in.

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_**2. Supervisor**_

Greg was late. Cuddy had half-expected him to be waiting (probably on his knees, even after yesterday) when she got in just before seven. But she had walked down to the oncology lounge, started their coffee maker, and poured herself a cup of the fresh brew, and Greg still wasn't there. She'd declined her own office coffeemaker because back when she'd started working at PPTH she'd promised herself she'd cut down on coffee.

Greg would be due in at the clinic at eight: Brenda had told her that she couldn't have Greg working on the front desk when he had so obviously been beaten up, but that she'd find something for him to do in the stockrooms or filing.

Cuddy had stopped off at a 24-hour store on her way to work and bought Greg the largest, glossiest box of cookies she could find, and a pack of ground coffee and a bag of sugar for the office coffeemaker - the hospital wouldn't start supplying the coffeemaker in Diagnostics until the new fellow was hired, but Cuddy had decided, grinning to herself as she picked up the items and paid for them, that Greg deserved this kind of treat. At least two Board members had indicated to her casually that they found the slave's papers on diagnostics very interesting: she planned to take Greg over to their offices later this afternoon, after his morning's work in the clinic, and introduce Greg to them - that would take coaching, he couldn't act too subservient, but it wouldn't be appropriate for him to behave just like a free person.

Greg was probably lost in his work, Cuddy thought at twenty past - no one was answering the phone in Diagnostics, and it occurred to her that Greg might well have unplugged it: but it seemed inappropriate to go send a security guard to have him dragged up here, to praise him for yesterday and to reward him. She'd go down to the Diagnostics office, give him a fright, warn him not to be late again and not to unplug his phone. Then he'd get the treats and she'd show him the fax with his test results.

The office was empty. The books and notepads were stacked tidily on the desk, but apart from that there was no sign anyone had been there. Cuddy sniffed: there was a faint smell of _something_ in the air, not tobacco smoke, but something not belonging in an office. Annoyed that her grand gesture had fallen flat, she put the bag from the 24-hour store on the table by the coffeemaker and folded the fax with Greg's results on it and put it into her purse. The exercise field opened at seven, and Greg had probably gone early, to get it out of the way before clinic rather than after.

Yesterday, Matt Johnson had pretty much admitted to molesting Greg. He'd also claimed Greg enjoyed it, which Cuddy was keeping an open mind about - Greg House had been blatantly interested in three things at medical school: medicine, getting drunk, and having sex. Slaves weren't allowed to drink (and Cuddy had no intention of allowing Greg any access to alcohol) but PPTH had a written policy that staff could have sexual access to hospital property, providing this didn't interfere with the slave's work and the staff didn't take unauthorised work breaks. If there was a dirty rumor going round that Cuddy was using Greg in that way, she couldn't afford to show any interest in trying to limit access to Greg, as if she had him tagged.

Cuddy picked up one of the notebooks and flicked through it: this was the page by page annotations and corrections of the standard textbook she'd told him to read. Greg had pretty clear handwriting. Cuddy stood at the desk, leafing more slowly, reading the comments with appreciation: she could almost _hear_ Greg House's voice in her head.

She put the notebook down and looked round the office suddenly, but Greg wasn't there. Johnson had admitted to molesting Greg, and that would be why Greg, a fitness fanatic, had been resisting going to exercise, so she could be pretty sure he _hadn't_ enjoyed it -

Cuddy leaned her hand on the notebook and bent over the desk. She had suddenly got a picture in her head, of Greg House bent over like - like an _animal_ - while Matt Johnson, dressed in that ill-fitting shabby suit and tie, _raped_ him. She leaned on the desk and took deep breaths. After a moment, she stood up again.

Greg was a slave. The hospital owned him. He had to be fit to work hard, as a doctor: he had to be well-rested, well-treated physically, he shouldn't get beaten up - not for any reason, not even if there was a _good_ reason, he was still smart as a whip and all he needed was to be told what to do. Cuddy had proved that, over and over again for the past two weeks. Greg was going to make this hospital the best known of its size in the US, better-known than bigger hospitals.

She could not afford to care about Greg as if he were a person. He was no longer a person, he was property.

The box of cookies, fine. She'd promised him that treat if he passed, and he'd passed. The coffee and sugar, that was ridiculous. She'd take those away with her, go back to her office, and call Brenda: Greg should report to her office when he was done with clinic duty.

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_**3. Nurse**_

When Greg didn't show up by eight, Brenda wasted no time in calling security to find Greg. Doctor Jenkins was down on the rota to work this morning, but he'd called in sick, so that left just Doctor Vickers till ten. A full complement of nurses, though: Brenda put the most junior on reception, and let Vickers know she'd be the only one at work for her stint.

The cleaning slave standing in the entrance to the clinic, one arm gripped by a security guard, was briefly an anomalous sight: then Brenda noticed the bruise spread over the slave's face, and realized a moment later that this was Greg. Briskly, keeping her movements calm, she got up and went over to the door before the guard could actually bring Greg in. She was pretty sure none of the patients would register his face if they didn't get to look at him closely.

"Greg, go down to the basement and change into your clinic clothes." She nodded to the guard. "Greg should_ never_ be outside the basement dressed like that. I don't know what the mix-up was this morning and it's not important right now: just get him out of here."

"You want him back?" the guard asked.

"Yes," Brenda said, mildly exasperated. Would she have told Greg she wanted him in his clinic clothes otherwise? Why was it people had to act like morons on days like these when she didn't have_ time_?

Brenda had told the guard she wanted Greg back partly because he could still be useful in the stockroom, but mostly to establish the principle of the thing: whatever the state of Greg's face, he owed four hours a day to the clinic.

She'd expected to see Greg come back by himself, once he was dressed for the clinic - but he was still being led by the security guard, his arm gripped like a leash. He looked dazed and frightened, and Brenda didn't like that.

She guessed that someone in the basement had decided that a slave as badly bruised around the face as Greg was, couldn't be allowed to be seen in public. Therefore, put him in a cleaning-slave's work outfit, and set him to cleaning bathrooms. That was a matter for Cuddy to sort out, but Brenda guessed from the look of confusion and fear on Greg's face, that no one had told him anything - he'd been sent off to clean, then dragged to the clinic, then dragged back to the basement and made to change.

She nodded to the guard. "Greg's working in the clinic now, you can go."

"He was hiding in a closet," the guard told her.

"What?" Brenda stared at Greg in mild disbelief.

"The slave," the guard indicated with a jerk of his thumb, as if Brenda could have thought he meant anyone else. "Mrs Foster's sent a memo to Doctor Cuddy, but he'll get six for that, running off from work. I need to stay here and watch him until he gets disciplined, I don't know why Mrs Foster didn't cane him right away."

"Fine," Brenda said. She pointed at a chair by the wall. "You can watch him from there, I'm not having you disturbing the patients." She took hold of Greg's arm, as he seemed unwilling to step away from the guard, and tugged. Greg came with her without any resistance, his head bowed, his hands clutched together over his stomach. She walked him to the stockroom. "You started on this yesterday, you can finish it off this morning."

The job of checking the stocklist and the labels of every item in the stockroom was arduous, but Greg had made a good start on in it in an hour on Wednesday morning. When Brenda came back into the stockroom she found the clipboard with the list lying where Greg had left it on Wednesday: Greg was down on his knees on the floor, using a cloth to wipe down the shelves.

"Is this all you've done?" Brenda said, really exasperated. Second shift there were two doctors, but one of the nurses had cancelled: Brenda had decided she'd just have to tell Greg to sit the reception desk, never mind if he looked exactly like someone who'd been kicked in the face.

"This slave..." Greg's voice cracked. He looked very frightened. "Sorry. This slave's sorry. There wasn't a cleaning kit. This slave ... please..."

Brenda was too astonished to interrupt him: this was _worse_ than the little meltdown about the coffee. Greg knew what he'd been sent into the stockroom to do, and it wasn't light dusting. Anyone could have been sent into the stockroom to refresh supplies - Brenda was pretty sure at least one of the nurses had gone, and she made a mental note to have a word with her about not gossiping.

"Greg. Get up."

Shakily, Greg pushed himself to his feet. He was looking down at her now, but he still looked scared - and past the fear, mortally confused.

"Do you know where you are?" Brenda asked.

Greg swallowed. "Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital," he said.

"Do you know who I am?"

"Nurse Brenda," Greg said, more certainly.

She was wearing a nametag that identified her just in that way, and Greg had never called her anything but "ma'am" or "Nurse Previn", before. The name of the hospital was printed on labels and notices all over the stockroom. Brenda sighed.

"Do you know what _your_ name is?"

Greg's eyes went wide. He went to his knees again, so quickly that he actually thumped down on the floor. "Whatever you say, ma'am."

"Get _up_," Brenda said. "Just stand there." She went out and got a light chair from behind the reception desk, and brought it back into the stockroom. "Sit down on that." He obeyed her, still staring at her wide-eyed.

"Sit there. Don't move, don't speak to anyone, till I come back. Got that?" A little reassured by his nod, Brenda went back to reception and placed a quick call to Lisa: she wasn't going to explain the situation over the phone, but she needed to talk to her about this: Greg seemed to be in a fugue state. He certainly wasn't functional.

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**_4. Driver_**

Ted didn't own his own truck or his own unloader, but he'd worked for LJK Trucking for ten years now and he generally drove the same flatbed and had the same big boy. The unloaders were "big boys" in the company parlance: Jo wasn't even as tall as Ted, but like all unloaders he had muscles on his muscles, tough as a mule. Ted generally let Jo ride up front in the cab, and though he'd tell anyone who asked that it was because flatbed-riding unloaders needed more maintenance, the fact was, he liked the company, even if Jo didn't talk much.

This load was the one of a whole lot of deliveries due at the Princeton hospital. There was a building project of some kind going on, maybe even a new wing, Ted guessed. He told Jo about it going along the road: the new building design had a whole lot of picture-windows planned, big plate glass, no good at all in New Jersey winters. Jo listened, nodded, occasionally smiled and rarely said anything. He had a hoarse low voice, sounded as if it hurt him to speak: Ted had asked him once if the collar hurt his throat, but that was one of the times Jo hadn't said anything.

Ted left Jo to start the unloading and went inside to find someone to sign off on the delivery. There was the usual trouble finding someone, but the right guy came out at last and counted off the pallets of structural steel that Jo was shifting from the flatbed to the place they were to be stacked, and agreed he could sign off on their delivery just as soon as the unloader finished, and that had better be soon.

"He's moving as fast as he can," Ted said politely. There was a maximum amount that Jo could shift on the pallet trolley, and Jo was the best judge of what that was: Ted wasn't going to pile on the load and take Jo into the depot with a busted-up back.

The guy looked at his watch and made some comment about lazy slaves, which maybe Jo took personally, but Ted wasn't ever sure: it could just have been the cussedness of things, like his dad used to say. One of the pallets slipped sideways, and Jo jumped back before it went down - could have landed on his legs and broken them, but it bust open and the steel elements broke out, big clash and bang but they had all fallen together on the ground, no harm done -

Jo was gripping his arm and looking down at himself with a blank expression: there was a big wooden splinter in his forearm, and he was bleeding. Ted shouted and ran over, grabbed Jo's arm, yelled at the guy they needed a doctor. Guy tried to tell him he needed to take Jo round to ER, they treated slaves there, Ted shouted back that he needed a doctor _now_, hospital full of doctors, he wasn't going to drive round the whole building till he got to ER with Jo's arm pumping out blood and his muscles feeling cold.

Then Ted looked up and saw, right ahead of him on a glass door, a sign that said FREE CLINIC. There'd be doctors there. He dragged Jo with him as he went, at top speed, towards the door. The door was locked so he shouted and banged on it until it opened: the nurse who greeted him said, as grim as an army sergeant, that they were closed and he should take his slave to ER.

Ted explained, probably way too fast and with too much swearing, that he wasn't taking Jo round the houses to ER, his boy needed the splinter out and his arm bandaged up,_ right now_.

He hadn't even finished before the nurse said, still grimly, "All right, come in. Exam room two," she added, pointing - they were still open, at least there were patients still in the waiting room, and Ted heard one of them complain that her children shouldn't have to see things like that. Ted would have given the bitch a piece of his mind, but the nurse practically shoved him and Jo into exam room two, and told him to keep a grip on the slave's arm, a doctor would be with them shortly.

She brought back a doctor who looked like he'd been in a bar fight - and lost - but he didn't say anything when he saw Jo's collar. In fact he didn't say anything at all: the nurse told Jo to lie down on the exam room table, and said to the doc, "You need to treat him."

The doc just looked.

"This man has a splinter wound in his forearm at least four inches long. Fragments remain in the wound. He is bleeding. What treatment do you propose, Doctor House?" The nurse sounded almost too damn emphatic, like she was reminding the doc what he was supposed to be doing.

The doc still didn't talk much, but that was OK: once the nurse had got him started, he treated Jo just like any other patient, cleaned out the wound - even gave him a local, which Ted was startled at and Jo looked big-eyed with surprise - and then stitched him up and bandaged his arm. He talked to Ted about aftercare like he was talking to Jo, it was kind of strange but Ted figured at least the doc _was_ taking care of Jo.

Then in the middle of telling Ted, while looking at Jo, to keep the wound clean and change the bandage and not let it get wet, the doc's voice trailed off and he looked round the room as if he was seeing it for the first time. He looked incredibly confused. He stared at Ted and Jo and the nurse. His mouth opened silently.

The nurse cleared her throat. "Excuse me," she said quickly, and took hold of the doc's arm and steered him outside. She came back in a moment later.

"We don't treat slaves in the free clinic," she told Ted. "Slaves injured here have to be taken to the ER where we have facilities to treat them. Does your slave have a recent tetanus shot?"

"I don't know," Ted admitted. "He's not mine, he just works for me. He belongs to LJK Trucking, see, he's an unloader - "

"I don't have _time_ for this. The slave will need antibiotics and may need a tetanus shot, if he hasn't had one in the past twelve months. He won't be able to do heavy work till that injury's healed. Now get out of here. We don't treat slaves."

"Yes, _ma'am_," Ted said very briskly, suddenly getting it. He dropped his jacket around Jo's shoulders to hide the bandage, grabbed Jo's uninjured arm, and pulled him out of the room. Jo was still looking bewildered: Ted figured he'd explain when they were in the cab. The doc who'd stitched Jo up was standing by the reception desk, still looking blankly around him: Ted sketched a wave at him as they went past, but he didn't react.

In the truck on the way back to the depot, Ted glanced at Jo a few times before he said, "Look, I'm going to get you back, right? You're a good worker, they'll give you light jobs till your arm's healed up. I want you back on the job, okay?"

Jo glanced at him and nodded. He looked relieved. He said, after a few minutes, "That doctor..."

"Yeah, seemed like a good enough guy," Ted said. "Gave you a local and everything. The head nurse lady, she wasn't bad either. Kicked us out so she didn't get into trouble, guess she's really not supposed to let slaves in there. Can't blame a person for covering their own ass." He went on expounding on this, and Jo listened and nodded. He was good company on the road. Ted was going to miss him for however long it took for his arm to heal up.

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_**5. Overseer**_

Doris had expected an angry phone call from Doctor Cuddy Thursday morning, just as soon as she got the memo Doris had composed.

There had been three memos about Greg on her desk this morning, two from Sarey and one from the security guards: Sarey had noted Greg's state when he came downstairs from the unsupervised office, too late for his evening meal. He'd been a mess - from the look of him, Sarey reported, it hadn't been his fault he'd missed his evening meal, and Sarey had decided to let him just shower and go to his bunk: it looked as if Greg had got fed during the evening, and stuffing him with slave chow would likely have meant he'd vomit in the night. The second memo, from the security guards, was a simple report that before midnight, Greg had woken the dorm with sleep disturbance, and as they were not allowed to discipline or drug him, he'd been put into the security cage to finish his night's sleep there. Sarey's second memo reported that Greg had left the basement dressed in ordinary work clothes and with a cleaning kit.

Nathan Perez didn't bother leaving a memo. He just trotted along to Doris's office and declared that the big slave, the one who belonged to Doctor Cuddy, hadn't shown up for his grooming session Wednesday, and so Perez had been looking out for him this morning and hadn't seen him in the canteen. Doris called security and gave them a heads-up about Greg: just in case Greg was thinking of leaving the hospital. That would be a useful way of ensuring Doctor Cuddy was completely wrongfooted, though Doris didn't ordinarily approve of letting a slave even_ try_ to make a break for it.

About eight, a security guard brought Greg back to the basement, on instructions from Brenda Previn to have Greg dress in his clinic clothes and return to work there. The guard reported to Doris that the slave had been found hiding in a hall closet on the second floor. Not very well hidden, just curled up in the back of the closet, making no resistance when taken out.

That was two strokes for missing his evening meal, two strokes for missing his morning meal, six strokes for running off from work... and, if Doris chose to make an issue of it, a judicial whipping for what could be called an attempted escape. Doris had considered that - the memo was ostensibly a request for permission to discipline Greg appropriately - but decided that was better delivered verbally, to Cuddy herself and to the Trustees. Though Doris was fairly certain_ this_ hadn't been an attempt to escape, the fact was that the unsupervised schedule Cuddy had set for Greg laid him open both to vandalism of the kind that had happened on Wednesday night, and the ability to avoid both work and necessary maintenance, as this morning.

The thing to do was get Brenda Previn on her side. Greg could work in the clinic, supervised by Previn: outside clinic hours, he could work as a cleaning slave. If there was a concern he might be recognised by patients, he could clean areas of the hospital where patients were generally not allowed. The idea of an independent office, accessible to anyone, was genuinely unworkable, and when the Board members read her memo - which Doris had cc'd to each of them - that would be obvious.

Doris had expected an angry phone call from Doctor Cuddy well before lunchtime. When none came, she went upstairs to the clinic after it had closed: Previn worked there until two or later, after which she finished her working day in the ER.

"Look," Previn said, politely enough, "he may be a slave, but he's a good doctor."

"Do you think this idea of Doctor Cuddy's can work?" Doris asked. "Setting a slave up in an empty office, letting him work there by himself without supervision?"

Previn looked at her. "He will work," she said. "He got more work done in the past week or so than I'd have believed possible."

"Vandalism is a problem with all our slaves," Doris said, as plainly as she could. "We can't _stop_ people from making use of them outside their work, but with supervision we can ensure that this doesn't damage them. Doctor Cuddy doesn't seem to appreciate that."

She was surprised to see Previn react, strongly. "Is that what happened to Greg?"

Briefly, Doris described what Sarey had noted about Greg yesterday night: skin abrasions, bruises on his wrists indicating he'd struggled while cuffed, and messy with food substances. "He should be caned for missing meals and for running off from work, but that's not the main issue: he needs to be worked under supervision - here in the clinic, and as a sanitation worker somewhere patients won't see him."

Greg came out of the second exam room. He ducked his head and moved towards them, saying in a subdued voice, "I've finished, Nurse Previn."

Doris looked him over. He was bruised and moving with a little difficulty, but in her estimation he could take a caning. He shouldn't be going back to that unsupervised office again, and she said so to Previn. "I'll ask Mr Smith to find some work for him to do."

"No," Previn said. "I need to go talk this over with Doctor Cuddy. _I_ need to: I don't want Greg damaged like this again, he's going to be too useful in the clinic."

"Thank you," Doris said, sincerely. She understood after the meeting with the Dean yesterday that Greg was genuinely valuable as a doctor. "Tell Doctor Cuddy that I can loan her a cane, and that I really hope we can resolve this situation to the hospital's benefit."

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_**6. Security**_

Anna had been sent along to investigate "someone causing a ruckus" in the old lecture theater. She thought when she reached the hall outside that the person who'd called in a "ruckus" must have been tone deaf: this was music. There was an old piano in the lecture theater, no one had ever explained where it was from or why it hadn't been taken away, but every so often some student or even a straying patient would try to play it, and thanks to the acoustics in the old room, the noise could be heard quite a long way down the corridor. But this actually sounded _good_ - too loud for a hospital, but something you'd pay to hear.

There were a bunch of people sitting around inside, students and staff, and when Anna opened the door it actually took a minute before the nearest people started getting up guiltily and finding somewhere else to be. Anna didn't blame them - the doctor at the piano didn't stop playing, and he was good - but they had to go and he had to stop. Someone had left a big box of cookies on the piano, but no one claimed it as they left.

He went on playing: Anna walked over to the piano, and stood watching his hands on the keys for a minute. Then she cleared her throat. "Excuse me, sir, but this _is_ a hospital."

"I hadn't noticed," the doctor said, lifting his chin to look at her.

He was massively bruised. He was wearing a rolltop under his white coat, with a bulge in it. He was the slave Anna had cornered Sunday before last, when she'd thought she was going to have to shoot him.

She nearly drew her gun again. More sensibly, she reached for the piano lid and slammed it down over the keys: he drew back his hands just in time. He looked at her without any visible docility or respect.

"A hospital," the slave told her, "is where you take sick people in and make them better. This place is a prison, a warehouse, a bordello, and a - " He seemed to see her hand on her gun, and stopped talking, mid-sentence. After a moment, he lifted his chin and went on, "Damn, you distracted me, I was trying to think of another noun, and it would have been a _good_ noun. Aren't you the woman who nearly shot me? I never forget a hired killer."

Anna slapped him. She was shocked and shaking. She had never been spoken to like that by a slave before. "Get down on your hands and knees," Anna said, reaching for a tone of command. "Now!"

The slave didn't move. "I am worth more money than you get paid in a year," he said. "I am worth so much money that if you kill me you're going to find yourself wearing _this_ for a fashion accessory, and probably so will your children, if you've dropped any spawn worth selling." He was touching his collar under the rolltop, grinning at her horribly, showing all his teeth. "Just how exactly do you mean to make me do anything?"

Anna stood still, staring at him: he was taller than her and stronger than her. Slaves did what they were told, that was axiomatic: slaves were terrified of free people, fearful if she even touched her gun or raised her voice. She really did have no way of making him move. He reached for the box of cookies, and held it out to her, and she stepped back, warily, to the phone on the wall by the door, never taking her eyes off the slave. When she was out of reach, he lifted the lid on the piano and started to play again.

When the new contingent of security guards arrived, Anna was shamefully relieved to see that they were four of the biggest men who worked in the hospital. The slave played one last loud ripple of music, and closed the lid of the piano down. He stood up, lifting his chin, and they came for him, silently and efficiently cuffing him and shackling him and shoving a gag in his mouth. Anna stood by the door and watched. They'd brought a pallet trolly with them and they dumped the slave on it and covered him with a tarp.

"Okay, we'll get him down to the cage," one of them told her. "Are you all right, sweetie? You look pretty shook up."

"I'm fine," Anna said.

"Must have been pretty scary." Ben: his name was Ben. He worked on a different shift from her usually. Anna realised she was feeling cold. Not just because she had been faced with a slave who wouldn't obey and she couldn't control: but because none of the other security guards had ever called her 'sweetie' before. Not ever.

_tba_

_Tailkinker will post Greg's Day tomorrow. Read and review! There's going to be a longer-than-usual gap because I won't be able to post my Day on Sunday, but you'll get it Monday as usual_.


	16. Day 15

_The next-to-last day! Warnings - the usual for collarverse: slaves exist, Greg House is one of them, this is the story of his first sixteen days at PPTH. Horrible Things Happen to House. Sequel to Seven Stages, takes place fifteen years before Collar Redux begins. Parallel story by Tailkinker to be posted tomorrow._**  
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**Day Fifteen (Friday)**

**_1. The Peach_**

Anything that was said at breakfast, the kitchen supervisor could overhear. But this piece of news wasn't secret: yesterday Crazy Greg hadn't been seen at breakfast after spending half the night in the cage, and he hadn't been seen at evening meal because he was already back in the cage, and he wasn't let out of the cage till after he should have gone for breakfast: Sam had been told to take a bowl of slave chow and a bottle of water to the security station, and they were letting Greg out.

The story the Peach heard said he'd grinned at the guards and told them their room service sucked, and if it was true, the whipping post was going to see use. Two of the guards at least could deliver a "judicial whipping". The story about yesterday was Greg had bragged to one of the guards that he was too valuable for them to make him do anything.

Greg would be gone. The Peach wasn't sorry. He was crazy. It was probably Doctor Cuddy's fault mostly, but Greg could have listened to her, or Jon, or even Kev, or just thought for himself about the way free people thought about slaves.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

**_2. Supervisor_**

Two security guards delivered Greg to Cuddy's office at seven, as she'd requested: he was wearing his clinic clothes, as she'd directed, except for the labcoat and rolltop: one of the guards handed those over to Cuddy as the other took off the shackles and cuffs. Cuddy put the bundle down on her desk and realised there was something solid in with it. The guard dropped the shackles and cuffs on top of the clothing. The thing folded in with the labcoat was a gag.

"If you have any trouble with him, ma'am, contact the security station at once," one of the guards told her. "Mr Talbot says he should stay in the cage till he's sold."

Derek Talbot was the head of security for the hospital. Cuddy frowned at them. "Thank you, you can go, and take those with you." She gestured at the equipment on her desk.

"Have to leave them here, Doctor," one of the guards said. "Orders." But they left: Greg was kneeling in the middle of the floor, and Cuddy nodded to him. "Get up." She was not pleased with him, and she expected to see him cringe, but he just stood, his face expressionless, and waited. The bruising on his face was grotesquely colorful now, he couldn't be admitted to the Board meeting even if he was mentally stable.

"Sit down," Cuddy told him, pointing at the chair in front of her desk. Brenda had told her the test she'd run past Greg. "Do you know where you are? Do you know what my name is?"

He answered both questions correctly, without any apparent confusion or fear. The third question, oddly enough, was what Brenda said had really triggered the meltdown. "Do you know what your name is?"

"Doctor Greg House," he said, steadily, his eyes level with hers.

"What happened to you on Wednesday evening?" Cuddy asked abruptly.

Brenda said he'd stammered and denied anything had happened, and Cuddy had expected to have to force an answer out of him, to point out that Mrs Foster could confirm that he had new injuries from Wednesday evening, but Greg only looked away, out of the window. "I don't want to tell you," he said in a thin, very level voice. "But there are photos. One of them had a camera, they both used it."

Cuddy stared. "Photographs... of what?"

Greg shrugged. He still wasn't looking at her. "Diagnostics equipment," he said. "Being used. In the Diagnostics office." He swallowed.

"Who were they?" Cuddy asked.

Greg swallowed again, a big scared gulp of air. He was trembling. He gave her the names. One of them was the security guard who'd driven them to Trenton: the other was a doctor whose name Cuddy didn't recognise.

"Okay," Cuddy said. She wrote the names down. She'd find them and deal with them. "You were in a fugue state for half the day yesterday, are you aware of that? Nurse Previn says you came to yourself sometime after two, and she told you to go to your office, is that correct?"

Greg was still not looking at her. "Yes," he said.

"Mrs Foster has advised me I should have you caned for missing your evening meal and your breakfast, and for wandering off from your work yesterday morning. I don't consider any of this to be your fault. Look at me when I'm talking to you, Greg."

He went on looking out of the window, but after a few moments his head swung round and he stared at her.

"Nurse Previn is of the opinion it was a true fugue state, probably triggered by the events of Wednesday evening. Nothing like that should happen to you again, I'll see to that. But you were yourself when she instructed you to go to your office and instead you wandered off, weren't you?"

Greg shrugged again. "I suppose so," he said.

"According to the security report, you were in the old lecture theater, where you had no business being, and you were making a row on the piano, which you shouldn't have touched. When you were told to stop, you disobeyed and you were insolent to the security guard. The security staff in this hospital can't tolerate that kind of behavior from slaves." She intended to tell Greg he would have to apologize to the guards he had spoken insolently to, and of course he couldn't be allowed to play the piano there.

Greg grinned, showing all of his teeth. It was an expression without the slightest humor. "They'll have to, won't they? I passed my tests. I have my license back. You can't stop anyone from making use of the Diagnostics equipment out of hours, but you're not going to sell me or let the security staff kill me or beat me up. Right?"

Cuddy stared, astonished.

Greg was still grinning. He repeated, "Right?" and Cuddy remembered: this was what Greg House had been like; this was exactly why no one had really liked him.

Cuddy glanced down at the equipment on her desk - the shackles, the cuffs, the gag. She could summon the security guards, she could have them chain Greg up again, gag him. Then what?

She was absolutely invested in having Greg here. Being the doctor she knew he could be, as this hospital's possession. She stood up, and saw him flinch: not much, but he was scared, this was as much bravado as insolence. She walked round him, watching him tremble.

"This afternoon the Board meets to vote on funding for the Diagnostics department for the next six months," Cuddy said. "If the vote fails, of course you'll be sold. We have the option of returning you to the New Jersey center for a refund, less an administrative charge. If that happens, it wouldn't be worth having you disciplined for your insolence. If the vote passes, I'll advise Mr Talbot that we intend to keep you, and discuss the proper measures to take with you."

She sat down behind her desk again, glanced at the clock. "We expect to receive notice that your license has been reinstated today. Report to the clinic and stay there until Nurse Previn says you can go." She'd tell Brenda to take Greg to work in ER if necessary: he shouldn't have to go back to his office. "You should make sure the groomer tidies you up," she added. "Whether we sell you or not, you should look presentable."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**3. Doctor**_

Jenkins called in sick on Thursday. He felt sick, sick to his stomach. He was ill, he told them, he was throwing up. He wasn't, but he wished he could. He'd never used a slave like that before. The slave had enjoyed it, he'd orgasmed while Jenkins was inside him, but they'd left slave and office in a mess, _someone_ was bound to notice... and the slave wasn't his. He could blame Edwards for it, especially if the guard really had just quit, but what if he were still at the hospital and _he_ tried to lay all the blame on Jenkins?

He went back Friday. He had to. He felt like calling in sick again, but he claimed it had been one of those 24-hour bugs. "Or maybe you ate something," one of the other doctors said, and Jenkins made himself grin. "Maybe."

He was working in oncology this rotation. He didn't like it. Patients who weren't going to live no matter what sickened him. He was coming out of one ward, glancing at his watch and wondering when he could stop for five and have a coffee, when the duty nurse caught his arm. "Doctor Jenkins?" She handed him a message slip. "You're wanted in the Dean's office. Right away."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**3. Dean**_

Interns never were very prepossessing: they were tired, they had skin break-outs, they ate badly. The Dean was used to this, and he was striving to be as kind as he could to this young man, who had gone from a first, frantic denial of everyhing, to admitting that he'd planned to "discipline" the Diagnostics slave and that the security guard - he confirmed the name the slave had given Doctor Cuddy - had made things get a bit out of hand.

Doctor Cuddy had identified the young man immediately as an intern who'd tried to sneak into the Diagnostics presentation, even though he wasn't eligible for a fellowship, and who the slave had told to leave. Doctor Cuddy had left the slave alone inside the lecture theater, but had seen this young man go, "tail between his legs".

"You realize," the Dean said kindly, very kindly, "that even if you had merely disciplined the slave appropriately for his insolence, you would still have gone beyond your remit. The slave is not your responsibility. You could have reported him if you felt his behavior merited correction."

The young man wriggled, literally, in his chair. "Yes," he said finally. "I suppose so. It just seemed like, simpler, to... you know, make clear to him myself. Slaves aren't supposed to talk like that to people."

The Dean nodded. "So you were aware that this was a matter outside your responsibility?"

"Yes."

That admission was enough. The Dean sighed. "Your difficulty here is that in 'disciplining' the slave, you committed an act of vandalism, on a very expensive piece of property. I accept that you didn't intend to let your vandalism go as far as it did, but you participated, you did not report the man you identify as the main culprit."

"He was off duty. We both were. It wasn't inside my work hours," the young man said lamely.

"Not relevant," the Dean said. "You were on your employers' property, committing vandalism. You are in very serious trouble, young man." He sighed, and said regretfully, "I believe we may have to prosecute both you and this Charlie Edwards." The young man's mouth fell open. The Dean kept his voice very regretful. "You see, we know there were photographs. You had brought a camera, and we know both you and Edwards made use of it. Should those photos be made public, that would appreciably diminish the value of our property, and the only way we have to recoup that value, would be to bring a civil case against each of you for your distraint."

The young man stared, mouth open. "My distraint... _My_ distraint..." He swallowed. The cool legal language was sinking in. Sale. Conversion of his legal personhood to chattel. "But the photos don't exist!" he said.

The Dean sighed. "We know you had a camera. We know photographs were taken. I'm very sorry, Doctor Jenkins, but either I have the undeveloped film in my hand within the hour, or the hospital must take civil action against you for your sale."

A small noise came out of Jenkins' throat. He was crying suddenly. "But I don't have the photographs," he said. "I don't have the film. I don't. Charlie took them, I swear... I don't have them." He was leaking tears, messy and frantic with the effort to convince the Dean, and after a while, the Dean thought he _did_ believe the young man - he was simply not the sort to hold out this long. "Please," Jenkins said. "Please, I just don't have them, my camera's at home, I haven't even bought film for it yet, Charlie just took the film, I don't have it ..."

"Why did Charlie take the film?" the Dean asked. The security guard had quit the previous day, and got two weeks pay in lieu of notice. Derek Talbot was dealing with that side.

Though the Dean had no intention of explaining why to Lisa Cuddy - or even to Derek Talbot - he found the security guard's motivation to destroy the film quite believable: he understood Cuddy's motivations for buying Greg House now he was a slave, but people did naturally think of sex as a motivator when a person was taking an individual interest in a specific slave. Someone would have to check to make sure the film had been destroyed, but if it had, all was well.

"Very well," the Dean said. "We can't keep you here."

Jenkins stared at him. "I have to get back to my work - "

"You don't understand," the Dean said, still very kindly, "You can't work_ here_ at PPTH any longer. You committed a serious act of vandalism, and we can't let that go overlooked. But I do believe you when you say you don't have the photographs because your partner in crime took the film, so we won't move to distrain you, providing the photos _were_ destroyed. You can go." He picked up the phone and asked his secretary to send Chris Barrie in.

"This young man has been fired," he told Barrie. "Please allow him to remove all his personal possessions and escort him from the building. Do not allow anyone to engage him in conversation. Mr Jenkins."

Jenkins looked at him. He was still sitting in the chair, he hadn't moved.

"I understand your family lives in Ohio," the Dean said. "If you allow Mr Barrie to enter your home and search for the film or for the empty camera, we will give you an ex gratia payment sufficient to travel to your family. A letter formally terminating your employment will be sent to your family address."

Barrie put a hand on Jenkins' shoulder. "Come on, kid," he said. He too sounded kind.

The Dean's field was nephrology: Doctor Greg House had been invited to speak at a conference the Dean was attending this autumn in New Orleans. The updated program had arrived this week, and a panel which should have had four doctors now had three, and the presentation on diagnosing obscure causes of kidney failure was simply gone. Doctor Cuddy was right to seize the chance of buying such a medical resource - but one of many difficulties that she evidently hadn't thought of, was protecting a living medical resource against mindless acts of vandalism. Not merely the direct damage done, but the damage to the hospital's reputation if, next time, there _were_ photos to publish of a slave doctor being abused.

It was entirely possible, unless this young man's family were very supportive and understanding and pretty well-off, that the young man would end up enslaved for debt. The Dean knew exactly what he would say to an enquiry from another hospital about why the young man had been dismissed from his internship after two months, and it would not encourage another hospital to accept him. He might have to deal with the towering debts of medical school without any prospects of employment at a doctor's salary. And once a slave, no one would listen to anything he had to say.

That might not be necessary with this Charlie Edwards: the Dean would trust to Derek Talbot's judgement about that, but from what Jenkins had said, the security guard had shown more common sense than the intern.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**4. Nurse**_

Martha Patrolli was on her way to the free clinic for her two hours when someone told her the news: Hog Jenkins was gone. Security guard escorted him out of the building. Patrolli was pleased but knew better than to show it: she couldn't stand Jenkins. She made an appropriately shocked/sympathetic face. "What did he do?" she asked.

"Everyone says it was something to do with that new slave, the one who wears a labcoat."

The new slave, in his labcoat and with a rolltop disguising his collar, was sitting at the reception desk handing out forms to patients arriving. He had a heavily bruised face: he was saying to a sympathetic patient, "I slipped and fell."

"On to someone's _foot_, it looks like," the patient said, and handed him her form back.

Brenda Previn hustled her to work. The new slave stayed at the reception desk all morning. "Is it true the clinic won't be needing as many volunteers?" Patrolli asked, in her coffee break.

"No," Previn said, equally abruptly. "There's a proposal before the Board this afternoon to make this clinic full-time." She looked tense and hopeful, Patrolli realised, and she wished her good luck politely.

"But that slave will be working here as a doctor?"

"He got his license re-instated," Previn said. "He'll be working here four hours a day, Monday through Saturday, starting tomorrow."

"How are we supposed to treat him?"

Previn gave her a look. "Like you would any other doctor," she said firmly. "I'm his supervisor while he's working here, and I don't want people wasting his time or trying to bully him."

Patrolli finished her coffee. She glanced over at the reception desk, and poured another cup, adding cream, and picked up a couple of packets of sugar and a stirrer. She went over to the desk and put the cup down. "Do you take sugar, Doctor House?" she asked.

The slave looked up at her: he had startlingly blue eyes in the middle of all that bruising. Patrolli put the packets of sugar and the stirrer down beside the cup, and added, much more quietly, "Hear you had something to do with getting rid of Hog Jenkins. Thanks."

She didn't wait for an answer - she wasn't sure she'd have got one - but when she glanced back, she saw he was drinking the coffee. She really had never liked Jenkins.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**5. Groomer**_

When two slaves arrived at the same time it always meant a mix-up somewhere. Nathan Perez told the two of them to strip off while he finished with the slave already here. One of them had the time of his appointment written on his back - the other, the tall slave with the bruised face, had only traces of permanent marker from his last appointment.

"You, what are you doing here?"

"Doctor Cuddy told me to report to you today," the tall slave said. He hadn't yet stripped fully, just taken off his t-shirt and folded it with the clothes he was carrying.

"Well, she should know I only do special appointments on Tuesday and Thursdays."

The tall slave went over to the vacant chair and lay down. "Naked!" Nathan said, just too late.

"No," the slave said. "You're just shaving my face. You don't need me to strip off."

The slave's clothes didn't smell too bad. Nathan got the slaves to strip as a routine to save time if a full shave was wanted, to keep hair out of their clothes, and because he didn't like the stink of a well-used set of labor clothes. But it was the principle of the thing. The other slave was stripped off and lying down in the other chair: in a minute or two there'd be the next slave coming along, it was almost the end of the day. Nathan never did this but he saw no alternative: with two quick snaps, he manacled the bad slave into the chair, and set about shaving the good boy.

The bad boy was silent for a while, then apologetic, then begging: he squirmed and kicked in his manacles, but the chair was solid. Though it slowed up Nathan's work having only one chair free. After a while a security guard came along and looked at the situation.

"Do you need any help with that?"

Nathan finished a slave and set her to sweeping. "He came along about half an hour ago. He wasn't on the schedule, but he obviously needs a shave and a tidy-up. But he wouldn't strip off, and he talked back to me. I was going to report him to Mrs Foster when I'm done for the day."

"I can do that," the guard said.

"Wait a minute, then, and I'll get him shaved." Nathan didn't want anyone saying he didn't turn the slaves out right. The slave was lying still now, not protesting, and Nathan's annoyance cooled. He finished shaving the boy's bruised face and gave him a light slap on one cheek. "Mrs Foster'll teach you better manners, I don't expect to see behavior like that again."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**6. Trustee**_

Doctor Ludkowski was already convinced to vote in favor of the six month's funding for the Diagnostic department and fellowship, not least because he approved of the free clinic, and tried to do a couple of hours there at least once a month: the slave would be put to good use and he was impressed with the papers the slave had written.

He could see other Board members looking dubious as Doctor Cuddy explained how her plan would have to work: the slave would have to be immune from punishment for expressing an opinion as a doctor, even in strong disagreement: would even have to be allowed to make medical mistakes without being punished for them: would have to live in a kind of bubble in the hospital where hospital staff at all levels would know he was to be "Doctor House", entitled to be treated respectfully - any disciplinary proceedings would have to go via the slave's supervisor, and it would have to be very clear that any vandalism would be severely dealt with.

"How do you expect to keep him under control? What's to stop him from running away?"

"He won't be allowed to leave the hospital unless under lock and key," Doctor Cuddy said. "This is a unique situation. All security guards will need to familiarise themselves with what he looks like and how he moves. I also want to suggest we place suicide mesh around the roof and under the window of the office and the conference room we plan for him to use. I've added the costings to the memo - "

Doctor Ludkowski looked at it, and interrupted a brief and boring disagreement about the cost of suicide mesh to agree, firmly, that they should have put this mesh around the roof some years ago, and the cost of adding more under the windows to which the slave had access did not strike him as insuperable.

"I believe three people have already been let go because of this slave," Doctor Woodrow said mildly. "If this goes on, we'll have no personnel left at the end of the year."

"Two," Doctor Cuddy corrected him. "One maintenance worker, fired because she was persistently smoking inside the building and tried to continue using the Diagnostics office as her own smoking area: and an intern who was grotesquely unprofessional. A security guard who assisted the intern has quit of his own accord."

"Grotesquely unprofessional" seemed a little unfair: all medical students played harmless jokes on the slaves, though this unfortunate intern really should have picked a cheaper slave to play his games with.

Doctor Ludkowski glanced at his watch. He wanted the meeting to be over with by three, and there were still two items on the agenda after this one. "Aren't we all in agreement that this Diagnostics experiment is worth a trial?" he suggested mildly. "How shall we measure its merits and success or failure?"

Five minutes later, the vote had taken place for funding and the Board had agreed that a subcommittee should discuss quality measurements and evaluate the Diagnostics department's performance and the slave's performance, and - not altogether to Ludkowski's surprise - he'd been pressed onto the committee. That was what you got for speaking up in meetings.

The next agenda item was funding the free clinic to go full-time. With any luck, they'd be done by three.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**7. Overseer**_

The guard delivered Greg to Doris Foster's office at quarter of three: the Board meeting wouldn't be over till three at earliest. Greg had cheeked Nathan Perez and tried to disobey him, apparently: he was still only half-stripped. The guard had shackled and cuffed him, and would have put him in the cage if Doris hadn't been in her office to take charge of him.

"Leash him up over there," Doris said, deciding. If the Board had voted half-way sensibly, Greg's supervisor would be Brenda Previn from now on, and they might get back to a reasonable schedule for Greg - and she'd insist that she should be able to cane Greg when he needed it, just like any other slave.

When the phone rang, Doris Foster didn't register that it was an outside line until after she'd picked it up. The male voice at the other end said, "Hello, this is Doctor Evan Rabine, I'm calling from Saint Francis in Trenton, I need to speak with someone about one of your slaves."

"Mrs Foster," Doris said automatically. "I'm the head overseer at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, how can I help you?"

The man sounded as if he were making an embarrassed laugh. "Well, this is going to sound a little peculiar, but I was the examiner of one of your slaves, 'Greg', on Wednesday. I wanted to speak with someone about him - "

"Do you have a complaint to make?"

"Oh, no, nothing like that," Doctor Rabine denied immediately. "I wanted to know how he was?"

Doris looked over at Greg kneeling by the wall. He was substantially bruised, but the injuries were all minor, so far. "I'm sorry, I can't discuss individual slaves with someone from outside the hospital."

"Could you put me through to someone who can?"

"You probably want to speak to Doctor Lisa Cuddy," Doris said. "I happen to know she's in a meeting right now: I suggest you call again at about four-thirty."

Doctor Rabine thanked her and rang off. Doris waited: she'd left a message with Doctor Cuddy's secretary. The phone rang at ten past three.

"Doctor Cuddy," Doris said, "I want your authorisation to cane Greg."

Across the room, Greg's head jerked up.

"Don't you want to know how the Board voted?" Cuddy sounded wearisomely playful.

"Please do tell me," Doris said, dryly. She could guess.

Cuddy told her: Doris glanced at the clock, tapping her fingers. Cuddy had got everything she asked for, for the next six months or until something too appalling to be overlooked took place. "Thank you," Doris said finally, when Cuddy seemed to have come to a halt a few minutes later. "That's very gratifying. Now about the issue of Greg's discipline ...?"

"I've discussed the situation with the security guards with Mr Talbot," Cuddy said, sounding altogether more business-like. "He's suggested a series of introductory sessions with all the guards, to take place over the next few days. He agrees with me that a whipping would send the wrong message at this time. From now on whenever we want Greg moved from one place to another, we'll use security guards who are physically capable of moving him against his will. Now what happened that makes you want to cane him?"

Doris explained. Nathan Perez was a pleasant, sweet-natured man, who almost never complained about slaves. There was a pause.

"I suppose," Doctor Cuddy said, almost reluctantly. "All right."

"Six," Doris said.

"Wait a minute," Cuddy said. "I want him closely supervised by someone you trust for the rest of the afternoon, until he goes to his dorm, and tomorrow morning. I don't want anything whatsoever to happen to him between now and when he begins his clinic duty tomorrow. No cage, no drugs, no one kicking him in the face, none of these little inexplicable injuries - "

"Quite," Doris agreed. "I'll see that he's supervised."

"No cleaning duties, either," Cuddy emphasised. "I don't care if he works or not, I want to make sure he's okay to start work in the clinic tomorrow morning."

"I'll see that he's supervised," Doris repeated. "Six?"

"All right," Cuddy agreed, finally, still reluctantly.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**8. Exercise**_

Nelson was hopeful he'd end up with Matt Johnson's job. It looked likely Johnson wasn't going to return from suspension.

He wasn't happy to see the new slave who'd lost Johnson his job, though as Mrs Foster had him on a leash he put a neutral expression on his face and said hello to her.

"I need you to keep this slave busy here till five," Mrs Foster told him. "He can run laps, or what you like. Then escort him to the kitchen and hand him over to the kitchen supervisor, that's Sara Graham. I want him to be under your eye personally until you can hand him over to Mrs Graham."

"Got it," Nelson agreed.

Mrs Foster unclipped the leash and handed it to him. "Thank you."

"Right," Nelson said, eyeing the slave with disfavor. "Get your clothes off, get out there and run laps."

The slave only seemed to hesitate for an instant. When he obeyed, Nelson saw, over faded cane marks, six fresh strokes. He whistled approvingly. "Good to see someone's been teaching you manners. Go on, run, boy. I'll tell you when you can quit."

Watching the tall slave run, Nelson saw that the other slaves were pointedly ignoring him. Johnson hadn't liked it when slaves talked to each other during exercise, but Nelson figured it was like their meals, it was some time they had when they should get to do pretty much what they liked, so long as they behaved right and weren't lazy. This slave wasn't part of the pack: he ran in isolation, no one spoke to him or smiled at him.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

**_9. Jon_**

Greg had been in the canteen already when they all came in: he was kneeling with his hands behind his back and his head up, by the food counter. Jon knew better than to look at him too closely or to pretend to ignore him. When the kitchen supervisor told him "Okay," there was no space left at the table where Jon was sitting, so he didn't see what Greg did: but it sounded like he had just collected a serving of food - it was a traybake tonight, with enough cheese to make it tasty, and they each had an apple - and sat down to eat it, just as if he hadn't spent all of last night and most of this morning in the security cage.

The kitchen supervisor called Greg over and made him kneel down again once he'd finished eating, Jon supposed: he was kneeling there as they all got up and left. During the day, Jon had heard garbled rumors about what was to happen to Greg (Nelson had been watching him exercise earlier: he'd obviously been caned hard by Mrs Foster) but the slaves who were personal assistants to Board members were saying they'd heard directly: Greg wasn't going to be sold. He was going to work as a doctor, they said: the Board had voted he was even to have a free person to supervise, who would have to call him 'Doctor House'. But all this while, Greg was kneeling in the canteen, under the supervisor's eye.

When they went to the showers, Greg was escorted there a few moments later, apparently from the canteen. When Greg had cleaned himself, the guard took him to the dorm and walked him to his bunk: Jon saw, following close behind, that Greg didn't even look scared or worried.

"They say you're going to be a doctor," Jon said, as soon as the guard had left the room.

Greg had pulled the blanket over himself. His voice was muffled. "I _am_ a doctor."

"I cleaned that office where you work," Jon said. He'd meant to say something sympathetic, but Greg said, harshly, "Yeah. You're a cleaning slave. That's what you do."

"It's where you work, you should be cleaning it," Jon said, more than a little annoyed. The other slaves were coming in from the showers, and Jon went and lay down on his own bunk.

Kev stopped by the bunk Greg was lying on and kicked it hard, without saying a word. He looked at Jon - obviously he'd heard Jon talking to Greg, or Greg's answers - and he was warning Jon off speaking to the slave again.

Jon wondered. He'd agreed to it because he'd thought Greg had to be crazy. Maybe Greg wasn't crazy. Jon hoped he wouldn't start screaming in his sleep tonight.

_tba_

_Tailkinker will post Greg's Story tomorrow, and on Wednesday I'll post the sixteenth day of Sixteen Days. Hope you enjoyed - please read and review!_


	17. Day 16

_Could hardly believe we'd got to the last day when I started to write this! If this is the first tme you've looked at this story, the warnings are... oh, go back and read the earlier chapters, okay? This is a sequel to Seven Stages, set fifteen years before Collar Redux begins. Parallel story with Greg's POV by Tailkinker._**  
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**Day Sixteen (Saturday)**

**_1. Kev_**

Kev still remembered the strong coffee, heavy with milk and sugar, that was his first association with early mornings. He used to gulp it down without thinking about it, the heat of the mug against his cold hands, the scalding heat in his mouth and throat, and buzz of caffeine and sugar. He could get coffee now - he had friends and connections in enough departments to get packets of coffee and sugar, most offices had coffee makers, but there was always a risk associated with it. Mrs Foster caned anyone who was caught pilfering, and that was a known risk and Kev didn't care - but making use of a coffeemaker, infiltrating an office and using its furnishings, that would get a whipping. And this morning they were being supervised, so it wasn't going to happen anyway. Kev remembered strong coffee, letting the memories fill his mind and the back of his throat.

The whipping post at PPTH wasn't often used. Kev had hopes that Crazy Greg would get whipped before he was sold.

They had been set to clearing offices this morning, and one of them was the office on the second floor that Crazy Greg had been sitting in. The furniture was all moved out, and Kev was set to clean the carpet while other slaves took the desks and filing cabinets away. Greg had been caught in here and well-used, Wednesday night, there were still stains in the carpet. Greg had looked like a dazed doll in the showers, with crap in his hair and marks on his body.

Kev didn't want to think Greg deserved it. He guessed Greg had probably done something to piss somebody off. Getting caned, that hurt, but once it was done it was over. Getting whipped, that was bad, but Greg needed schooling, he needed to quit acting like he was special. But what had happened to Greg on Wednesday night... Kev didn't want to think anyone deserved it.

Greg was getting sold. The guards had all been pretty vocal about that. Whipped and then sold. This office would be an unofficial smoking room again, and a safe place to stash things at night.

Greg was at breakfast, though. He was wearing his work clothes and he was kept kneeling by the kitchen supervisor till everyone was seated. Kev kept the place beside him empty with his elbow, until Greg was let up off his knees to collect his bowl of food and had to sit down beside him.

"Hear you're leaving us," Kev said quietly.

Greg glanced at him and said nothing, spooning the mush into his mouth.

"I cleared out that office you've been spending time in. Guess you weren't good enough for Doctor Cuddy after all."

Greg didn't even look at him. He went on eating.

"They say you're going to get whipped before you're sold," Kev told him. "Maybe you'll learn, boy."

Greg finished spooning mush into his mouth. He got up, almost recoiling from the bench, and took his bowl to be stacked for washing. He knelt down again where the kitchen supervisor pointed, and put his hands behind his back.

Kev saw Jon and Sam both staring at him from across the table and shrugged at them. "He's done for," Kev said quietly.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**2. Overseer**_

The phone call with Doctor Cuddy was quite literally the first pleasant conversation that Doris felt she had had with the administrator in two weeks. Greg was brought in while she was on the phone and she was able to directly report that he would be fine when he reported for his clinic duty. The guard leashed him up to the wall and put a roll-top and a white labcoat down on Doris's visitor's chair. Doris glanced at the clock. Nurse Previn had said she wanted Greg in the clinic at quarter of eight. She had time to check through her morning's routine paperwork.

Greg was kneeling in good form, hands behind his back, head bowed. No one had complained of him since his caning yesterday. Doris got up and walked over to him. "Greg. Have you had time to think about what I told you yesterday?"

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said tonelessly. He didn't lift his head.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you."

Greg did look at her, after a moment. Doris was surprised: he didn't look docile, so much as distressed.

"Tell me what you remember," Doris said, keeping her voice stern.

"I'm a slave," Greg said, his voice thin. "Disrespect and disobedience will be punished." He swallowed. "I will be punished if I am disrespectful or disobedient. I will not be treated differently because I'm a doctor. Ma'am."

"Doctor Cuddy has given me authorisation to cane you when you are in the basement, if you disobey or if you're insolent. I don't want to hear of any more talking back to people who are responsible for you, Greg."

"No, ma'am." Oddly, Greg looked less distressed. "I'm not... not being sold?"

"Who told you that?" Doris asked sternly.

"Doctor Cuddy said..." Greg swalllowed. "Yesterday. That if the Board voted..." Every slave feared being sold more than they feared being caned or whipped, in Doris's experience. While in general she did not approve of keeping slaves in confusion about their status - once the decision had been made to sell a slave, the chattel should be off the hospital premises as soon as possible - she thought it had probably done no harm to keep Greg in fear for a few hours.

"No," Doris told him, keeping her voice stern. "It's none of your concern how the decision was made, but I can tell you that the hospital still owns you, and has no plans to sell you - if you behave well and remain useful, of course." She thought to add, "You should also be aware that you're extremely valuable and we do not want you damaged. If anyone hits you hard enough to bruise, they'll be penalized for doing so - though of course you will still be caned for whatever insolence or disobedience you committed. I intend to warn everyone who works in the basement, and I expect Doctor Cuddy will inform other hospital staff, so they're aware that they must contact either Doctor Cuddy or myself if they want you disciplined."

Greg went on looking at her steadily. After a moment, he said "Thank you, ma'am," and sounded quite sincere.

"Good boy," Doris said. She glanced at her clock, and unhooked the leash from the wall. "Now come along." She picked up the labcoat and the roll-top, and handed them to Greg to carry, as his hands weren't shackled. She unclipped the leash at the top of the stairs, and told Greg to put on his rolltop and his labcoat. "Stay close to me," she told him, and walked across the foyer to the clinic, where she could hand him over to Nurse Previn: she would be glad to be done with this difficult, costly, fragile slave.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**3. Patient**_

The free clinic at Princeton-Plainsboro was a long bus ride from Emma's home, but no changes - all she had to do was get herself and Sharon on board the bus, and then keep Sharon from crying all the long way over, and finally walk from the bus stop to the clinic. Sharon was sleepy by the time they got there, and Emma filled in her form and handed it in at reception, shoogling Sharon in her buggy, hoping she'd sleep through the wait and maybe through the appointment too. Sharon didn't seem to be too bad off.

She was early because Sharon woke early. There were two doctors this morning, which was good: Emma had been here before when they had only one. She didn't expect to be high priority, but she got called pretty soon.

"Hello, I'm Doctor House." The doctor looked cheerful. He smiled at her and Sharon. "Which of you is my patient?"

"Well, I guess I am," Emma said, trying to sound bright. She had been sucking cough drops all the way over, but it hadn't seemed polite to do it in the exam room, and that nasty cough hacked out again. "I've had a real bad cough for two or three days, and my eyes hurt - they're sort of runny, see? - and I ache, like, all over. My little girl's in daycare and I think she picked up a cold, she's got a runny nose and she sneezes a lot, and I think she has a small fever. I guess I got it worse than she did, can you give me something for it?"

Doctor House looked them over. He had been standing by the exam room table, not sitting in one of the chairs, and Emma thought that was kind of nice, it looked like he was eager to start work. But he wasn't smiling any longer.

"How old is she?"

"She had her first birthday last month, on the eighth." Emma said.

"Is she vaccinated?"

"No," Emma said. She was quite prepared to defend this. "At our church, we don't believe in vaccination, so we set up this daycare group that doesn't make parents get their kids vaccinated. We believe our children are healthy enough without getting this kind of artificial poison inside their bodies. I got a leaflet here about it - " She was fishing in her bag, but the doctor said "No," quite abruptly.

He'd backed off a couple of steps. "How many kids at this daycare group?"

"Fourteen," Emma said.

The doctor stared at her with his mouth slightly open. After a moment, he said "And _none_ of them are vaccinated?"

"Well, I don't know, the whole point is we don't _make_ kids get vaccinated," Emma said impatiently.

"Congratulations," the doctor said. He paused. "You have a fine bouncing case of the measles. So does your daughter."

"Measles...?"

"You were probably vaccinated but it didn't take or your immunity wore off. It happens, not very often and it shouldn't matter, because measles epidemics shouldn't _happen_ any more. Except sometimes when a dozen morons put a herd of susceptible kids together. All the children at your daughter's playgroup have the measles. By this time so does everyone they live with who doesn't have an immunity. How did you get here this morning?"

"By - by bus - "

"Everyone on the bus could be infected. Do you know what happens to one in five adults who get measles? The complications _start_ with diarhea, vomiting, laryngitis, bronchitis, and pneumonia. You could also get inner ear infections or eye infections, and end up deaf or with a permanent squint. If your or your daughter's temperature runs high there's a one in two hundred chance either of you could have febrile convulsions - fits caused by high fever. Your daughter should be okay, you might not be. And there's a chance of hepatitis, encephalitis, blindness from neuritis, or heart complications. Plus, one in every hundred thousand measles patients can develop subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is a brain disease that causes convulsions, motor abnormalities, mental retardation and death." The doctor's grin, showing all his teeth, didn't look so friendly any more. "Some of these complications are pretty rare, but they're all possible. And you thought this was _better_ than vaccinating her? Parents are morons. What's the name of your church's day care center?"

"I'm not a moron," Emma said, nearly in tears. "I don't even have a _rash_."

"You will have, tomorrow," the doctor said. "Your daughter's just starting, see?" He stepped closer and pointed, without touching, behind Sharon's ears, showing a brownish mottling that Emma knew hadn't been there that morning. "You might even have a rash by the time you get home. What church do you go to?"

"Why do you have to know?" Emma demanded.

"Because measles is a notifiable disease," the doctor said. "The hospital will have to warn the CDC we might have a local epidemic, and everyone who goes to that daycare center has to be warned." He added impatiently, "Oh, stop crying. You're in for a nasty few days, but you're probably going to be fine."

"But Sharon - she's - "

"Children recover from measles a lot faster and easier than adults. Don't send her back to daycare for at least five days after the rash vanishes. Get someone at your church who _had_ measles to do your shopping."

"What about that disease you said, pan - pan - "

"SSPE," the doctor said. He looked exasperated. "Occurs once in every hundred thousand cases. Don't worry about it. When your kid's better take her to her family doctor and get her vaccinated." A moment later he added sharply "Stop crying. You get to go home, feel terrible for a few days, nurse your daughter, you've basically got nothing to worry about."

"My kid could _die_, you bastard!" Emma was really angry now. She spun round and headed towards the door. To her surprise, the doctor got ahead of her. "You can't stop me!" she told him. "I know my rights!"

"Sure," the doctor said. He looked anxious now. Good. "You need to stay in here while I get a nurse."

"No, I don't! I'm going home and you've got no right to stop me!" That would have sounded more effective, she was almost sure, if she hadn't had a coughing fit in the middle. She felt terrible.

The doctor stretched out his arms, blocking the door. He looked tense and worried. "Maybe I don't, but you can't leave right now. You really can't. You're very infectious. You can't go home in the bus, and if you came out that way I guess that's how you're planning to go home. So please, sit down, try not to breathe on the furniture, and let me go for the nurse." He was trembling, Emma saw with surprise: he looked really very worried.

"Okay," Emma said after a long moment, eyeing him curiously. "I'll wait in here." She sat down on the chair. It was a relief to sit, actually, because her bones ached as if she was tired to death. When the door closed behind the doctor she took another peek at the rash behind Sharon's ears. It might be her imagination, but the welts already looked redder and larger.

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**4. Doctor**_

"We should think ourselves lucky the moron didn't walk into ER," Doctor Reed said, with ghoulish cheerfulness. She was taking blood draws from the medical staff. "Imagine having to shut that down for two hours."

Three slaves who were supposed to be vaccinated against measles would be cleaning every surface in the waiting and reception area, and in the exam room. They knelt in the middle of the floor. Once they were done with their cleaning, they'd get sent down to quarantine cells in the basement until _their_ blood draws confirmed they had an immunity. The patients who'd been in the waiting area when the measles carrier came in were herded to one end of the room: the medical staff were herded to the other end. All the medical staff should be immune, of course, but Doctor Reed had seen too many nasty surprises.

Doctor Reed handed the rack of blood draws over to an intern to be rushed off for testing. "I'll join you in the lab once I've scrubbed," she told him, and turned back to the medical staff. "Which of you actually treated this patient directly?"

A doctor Reed didn't know raised his hand, and a young nurse glanced at him and raised hers. Brenda Previn glanced along the group and raised her own hand. "Sally was on the reception desk, Greg was in exam room two with the patients, and I came in with masks for the two carriers."

"Two?" Reed had only seen one, a young woman complaining vituperatively (and deliriously) about the horrid clinic staff.

"Mom and baby," the doctor said. It was the first he'd spoken: he'd been silent even when Reed took the blood draw.

"Do any of you know your immunity status?"

"I had measles when I was eight," Previn said.

"I guess I was vaccinated," the nurse said. She looked unhappy about it. "I never had measles."

"Did you go to public school?"

"No, parochial school," the nurse said.

"We'll give you a booster shot," Doctor Reed decided. She looked at the doctor.

"I was four," the doctor said.

"You're sure it was measles you had?" Doctor Reed checked. A young child's memory might not be reliable.

"I remember the rash, and I had febrile convulsions," the doctor said. He looked, briefly, amused. "I didn't touch either of our carriers, or any surface they touched. I'm not infectious."

Reed nodded. "What department do you normally work in?" she asked. She was surprised not to know who he was: he must be new.

The doctor shrugged. He no longer looked amused. "Diagnostics," he said.

Reed went from thinking But-there's-no-such-department to Oh-ho-so-_this_-is-the-slave, so quickly it felt like whiplash. She glanced at the three slaves kneeling in the middle of the floor. She'd asked for a cleaning crew of three because the hospital had exactly three quarantine cells for slaves. If she'd known the Diagnostics slave was in the clinic, she would have asked for two and then the three slaves could have done the clean-up and all gone to quarantine. But hopefully, the Diagnostics slave was right and he had an immunity.

"All right," she said, turning around and addressing the patients, "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry to keep you waiting, but we'll need to make you stay here a little bit longer. All of you who are immune to measles can go home soon, and I'll ask you to clean off your hands in case you touched any infected surface in the clinic. If you aren't immune, I'm very sorry but you may have to stay here a little longer." They'd need booster shots at least. "Measles is a very communicable disease, and we want to avoid it spreading." She turned back to the staff. "Can everyone who's _certain_ they had measles in childhood raise their hands?" Only three: Nurse Previn, the slave, and another nurse, a middle-aged woman. "Okay. The labs are testing everyone's blood for immunities. They'll be done inside an hour, I hope - I'm about to go up and help out. Meantime, you two - and you - " she pointed at the slave " - are the only ones who should go anywhere near the patients if they need anything. Is there anything you want me to send in? The fewer people who come in here, the better."

"We'll serve coffee and juice," Previn said. "We'll need disposable cups and more supplies - we've got just enough for staff. That'll calm them down."

"Good," Reed approved. She'd see if the canteen could put together a tray of muffins and sandwiches, too. She cast another glance over her shoulder at the patients. "I hear the adult carrier's complaining she was badly treated by us."

Previn looked coldly back at Reed. "Is she?"

"Whatever you said to her, she probably deserved. I phoned the church that runs this plague-care group - there are ten cases already that the person I spoke to knows about. I've told the CDC we're in for an epidemic. And I hear she took the _bus_ over to us. But the good news is, she's running a temperature of 104 - whatever complaints she's making in a fever, she's not likely to remember them once she's well."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**5. Supervisor**_

Doctor Cuddy had intended to take more time over introducing Greg to his new quarters and his privileges, but there had been a sudden influx of extra work that afternoon. Because of the situation, Greg had been stuck in the clinic anyway.

Doctor Evan Rabine had called her yesterday. He'd been one of the examiners on Wednesday. He'd known Greg House as a free man. Ostensibly, he'd called to congratulate her on Greg's triumph at the oral, but he had said, in a cramped, hesitant kind of voice, "I knew Greg House, you know. He made kind of a mess of his life, but he's a great doctor. Really great."

"I know that," Cuddy had said. She'd hesitated, unsure how to respond to this inquiry (on one level, very natural: on another, completely inappropriate), but finally she'd said "He'll be taken care of here, you know. He probably shouldn't see people he used to know, from his former life. He can practice medicine, but he's not a free person." She had not used the analogy of expensive medical equipment with Rabine, though she still thought it was logical. Friday evening, she'd been floating high on success: all day Saturday, there had been details to deal with, final points to be cleared up.

Just before five, Brenda called her. "I'm about to go home. Have you got Greg's situation sorted out?"

"Yes," Cuddy said. "I'm planning to go home myself in an hour. I'll call security and have them send someone to escort Greg."

"Make it soon," Brenda said. "It's been one _hell_ of a day."

Derek Talbot had arranged a schedule for his security staff to inspect Greg. The first group of about a dozen were waiting in the fourth floor conference room when Cuddy got there: Talbot greeted her and shook her hand, and explained that he'd already explained the situation to them. "One of my guys is on the way up with the Diagnostics slave."

The inspection didn't take long. Talbot let the dozen security staff look Greg over from all angles, make him walk up and down, even had him run from one end of the room to the other. He'd come directly from the clinic and was wearing a white coat and a roll-top: Talbot had fetched a set of the cleaning slave jeans and t-shirt and got Greg to change into those and had him walk up and down in the slave clothing, too.

"Obviously if you saw any slave leaving the building unescorted, you'd stop him. But if you see this slave leaving the building, even if he seems to be escorted, stop him and question his escort. Within the hospital building, he has leave to go about his medical business unescorted, and in front of patients you have to act as if he were any other doctor. Any disciplinary procedings have to go through Doctor Cuddy - or Mrs Foster, if the slave's in the basement - and they'll be formal: he'll be caned or whipped. If you see any other hospital staff disciplining the slave, even if in your judgement the slave deserves it, you need to stop them."

The security staff all seemed to be in a good humor about it. Talbot nodded to Cuddy. "Anything else, Doctor?"

"I want to emphasise how valuable Greg is," Cuddy said. "He's an extremely costly item of hospital equipment. While he may need discipline, he mustn't be damaged. The hospital administration will fire anyone who commits any act of vandalism on Greg, and we may consider further action to recoup our costs if any permanent damage is done, reducing his value. Any questions?"

"What if he's somewhere we don't think he has any business to be?" one of the guards asked.

"Stop him and question him as you would any medical staff you had a query about," Cuddy said. "If he's in the clinic or in his office or in this conference room, you can assume he has a right to be there and he shouldn't be interfered with. If he's anywhere a patient might witness your conversation with him, you should make sure the patients don't realize Greg's chattel status: doing so could reduce his value and may be considered permanent damage. If you have any reason to suppose that he _shouldn't_ be where you found him, you can take him into custody and contact me. Patient care, however, is a priority: if the Diagnostics department has a case, the Diagnostics slave may have a legitimate reason to be somewhere unexpected. I can assure you that if the slave trespasses or is insolent or disobedient, he _will_ be disciplined - by a proper procedure which will not affect his value."

Nods round the room. Talbot gathered up his security staff and left. Cuddy nodded to Greg. "Come," she said, and took him next door.

She'd be using the cramped little office on the second floor temporarily, for the next few months while the new wing was being built, and then she'd secure a big first-floor office for herself; even before she became formally the Chief Administrator for PPTH, her office would indicate her status. Her old office was big enough for a bunk to be fitted in the corner, to the right of the desk that Greg would now use.

"You'll sleep here from now on," she told Greg. "The conference room will be shared between the Diagnostics and Oncology departments." Once Diagnostics became permanent, she thought she'd have a connecting door made between Greg's office and the conference room, and have this a permanent bubble of Diagnostics space. "You must eat breakfast in the slave canteen each morning by eight, and you must eat your evening meal there between six and nine. You should log eight hours exercise a week in the exercise field. When you're in the basement, or if you fail to show up for meals or do exercise, Mrs Foster has my authorization to cane you if you're insolent or disobedient. The men's washroom down the hall has a shower, which you have permission to use." She glanced at her watch. "Mrs Foster tells me that slave laundry is done on Sundays, and she will arrange to have the slave who cleans the Diagnostics office collect your used clothing and bedding for laundry. You need to be clean and well-presented at all times. If anything affects that, let Mrs Foster know."

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said. He was looking at her oddly.

"The security staff are all aware of your status, and over the next few days Mr Talbot has arranged for all of them to inspect you. None of them will be able to pretend ignorance. If anything like Wednesday's incident happens again, you're to report it to me immediately."

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said. He was looking round the room. His mouth was open a little.

Cuddy pointed to a bag of toiletries on the desk - toothbrush and toothpaste, soap and deodorant and shampoo. "You should ask Mrs Foster for fresh supplies as you use these." She was pleased to see Greg's gaze follow her hand. She tapped on the pile of resumes on the desk. "You have all day tomorrow to review all of these and let me know your recommendations for the Diagnostics fellowship. I want you at my office by seven on Monday with notes on each resume you think is a viable candidate."

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said. Cuddy stared at him. He really sounded happy. The look on his face as he stared round the office: he looked _happy_.

"You understand that here is where you'll be living and sleeping from now on, except for your work and your meals - and exercise? You have to spend at least one hour on the balcony every day."

"Yes, ma'am," Greg said. He looked at her directly, his chin up. He swallowed; the collar at his throat moved. "Th - _I_ want you to know... Doctor Cuddy, I'm ..." Quite unexpectedly, he went down on his knees, and put his hands behind his back. He was still looking at her. "I'm very grateful. I'm glad you bought me. Thank you. I won't let you down."

Cuddy sighed. She smiled at him. She was tired, and it had been a hell of a day - a hell of a fortnight - but the worst was over. Greg was installed as Diagnostics slave, and he'd be happy and functional. "Good. I'll see you on Monday."

_*housemd*housemd*housemd*housemd*_

_**6. Jon**_

Three cleaning slaves were in quarantine because of something that happened in the clinic, so Jon was still cleaning at ten to six: he'd have to stop when he finished this bathroom, or he'd be too late for it to be overlooked.

The bathroom door opened and someone walked in: Jon ducked his head, hoping not to be interfered with, and went on wiping down the shower walls. When he'd finished, he stood up with his head ducked, planning to scuttle out of the door, but the man was standing by the door and he knew him.

Greg. Wearing his work clothing, but looking strange: Jon squinted at him for a moment. Greg looked back. After a moment, though, Greg lifted his chin and went around Jon to one of the urinals. Slaves used the cubicles if they had to use a bathroom free people used: but Greg just stood at the urinal like a free man.

"You'll get into trouble," Jon said out loud, and Greg glanced at him.

"Probably," Greg said. "But I'm pretty used to that."

**end**

_But of course **Tailkinker**'s parallel story from Greg's POV still has one day to go... and then this roller-coaster ride is over, and Greg is installed as the _*ahem*_ "happy and functional" Diagnostics slave that you get to meet fifteen years later on in "Collar Redux"._

_Things we both didn't expect: How much of the story would take place in bathrooms! That all of the staff at PPTH, even the slaves, turn out to have their own personality and backstory... whodathunk? And, worst of all... where the hell did all these fresh plot bunnies come from!_

_Thing One _**I**_ didn't expect - how much crazy fun it would be to write the story like this - each day working out how Greg's situation at PPTH developed with one or more points of view about Greg/the new slave, and then turning the story over to Tailkinker and getting to read Greg's point of view about the day. TK's great! Thanks also to Illumin, who took on the enormous job of beta-reading both stories and giving us her feedback.  
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_Thank you our readers for sticking with us for so long - we added it up and worked out that put together, these parallel stories make a novel 140,000 words long! If you liked it, please leave a review... if you didn't like it but read to the end anyway, please badmouth this dreadful, perverted, evil story to all your friends and get them to read it too!  
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